Re: requirements

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

Wes Hardaker <wjhardaker@ucdavis.edu> writes:

> IE, I'd love to have gnus automatically download and cache all
> articles in the agentized groups and only download new
> headers/articles when it didn't have cached copies.  This way, lots of 
> network traffic would be saved.  It wouldn't even have to open a
> connection to the imap server if no new articles were known to exist.
> If it tried to open a connection and failed, the articles wouldn't be
> available then.  Sort of an automated agent system is what I'm
> looking for.

I like this approach too.  I've been thinking about it, and it would
be easy to do this within nnimap -- it could keep a local disk cache
of articles.  It already keeps a cache of headers, going one step
further isn't difficult.

However, having support for downloading only unread mail (or the
generic solution with "Agent categories") would be difficult.  But I
don't really see the point, I want everything to be downloaded.  The
only problem with downloading everything is that disk space is wasted
and that it might be slow in huge folders the first time you download
things.

OTOH it would be confusing to have two disconnected modes in Gnus.

I'm going for the Agent approach now.  If articles was saved in the
Agent when you read them (plugged), things would pretty much be the
way we want, I think.

Perhaps we can tie nnimap and the Agent together, so that nnagent keep
the overview and article cache for nnimap seemlessly.