Re: A little help from my friends

[Simon Josefsson <jas@pdc.kth.se>]

Nathan Williams <nwilliams@primeon.com> writes:

>         I have the same problem. From reading back in the list
> archives, it seems that nnimap punts mailboxes with spaces in the
> name, because gnus can't cope with spaces either.

Yes.

>         I've started digging into the code to try and figure out where
> it's punting them so that I can implement some kind of invertable
> mapping between imap mailbox names and gnus group names, just to get
> something working. Unfortunately, my elisp is rather rusty.

I'd be happy to accept patches for it.

>         One general solution would be to apply the IMAP-modified UTF-7
> encoding to mailbox name characters that gnus can't cope with (what
> else besides space? I don't know).

Space, tab and newline I think. Other characters might break Gnus too,
but they should be easier to fix. Gnus uses space/tab as data
separators in some places without any possibility to escape the
characters.

> The mapping I propose translates ' ' to '-' and '-' to '-=-', which
> is invertable, visually similar to the original, and does not
> require shifted characters (an advantage for those of us who are
> prone to RSI problems). This would map:
> 
> Public Folders/Mailing Lists/Zope Folder
> to:
> Public-Folders/Mailing-Lists/Zope-Folder
> 
>         Comments?

This looks good. The proper solution is to make Gnus accept SPC in
group names, of course, but until that happen a scheme similar to this
is obviously needed.