[Kde-pim] Akonadi outbox & dispatcher agent [tentative design]

[Thomas McGuire]

Hi,

On Sunday 03 May 2009 00:35:37 Constantin Berzan wrote:
> Based on last week's discussions on IRC, here is an outline of how we plan
> to implement the global outbox with Akonadi.  (I'm doing that for my GSoC
> [1].) I am sending this email so that those who have taken part in the
> discussion can correct me if I misunderstood their points, and so that
> others can chime in as well.
>
> [1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-pim&m=123837257902211&w=2
>
> Background:
> * The mailtransport lib currently provides a combo box with a list of
> transports.  The transport type is uniquely identified by its index in this
> combo (TransportComboBox::currentTransportId()). This is convenient for
> applications and we want to keep this.
> * The mailtransport lib is currently able to send email using SMTP or
> sendmail (these are built-in).  Additionally, the nntp, groupware(?) and
> openchange resources implement their own protocols for sending email, and
> we don't want to duplicate that.
> * After sending messages, KMail puts them in a sent-mail folder. We want to
> keep that concept.
>
> Design:
> * The outbox and send-mail folders will be maildirs on the local machine
> (e.g. in ~/.local/share/mail/{outbox,sent-mail}).  Does it make sense to
> have two separate resources (outbox and sent-mail), or a single resource
> managing both these directories?

Single resource, we already have enough processes around with Akonadi.

> * Applications can put messages in the outbox collection.  If this is done
> via Akonadi, then the items will already have a send_with_transport
> attribute.  If not (e.g. a plain file is created in that maildir), then
> should the dispatcher ask the user for which transport to use?

I'd like a convenience API for this, (maybe in mailtransport itself?) that 
puts a KMime::Message into the outbox folder, and as a parameter one can 
specify the transport and the sent-mail target collection. That API method 
would then take care of putting the KMime::Message into the outbox and also 
create the attributes like after_sending_move_to_collection and 
send_with_transport.

> * The dispatcher agent will monitor the outbox collection, and when it
> finds a new message there it:
> - passes it to mailtransport (see below)
> - when/if sending has succeeded, moves the message to the sent-mail
> collection.  If the message contains a special
> after_sending_move_to_collection attribute, move it to that collection
> instead of sent-mail.  (This last bit is useful for things like
> keep-replies-in- current-dir).
> * mailtransport needs a way to find all the resources (like groupware) that
> can send mail.  Resources could provide dbus methods like canSendMail() and
> sendMail(msgID), and mailtransport can query each of them and if it
> canSendMail then put it into the combo box.  When asked to send a message
> using one of these transports, mailtransport simply calls the appropriate
> method for the appropriate resource, passing it the ID of the message in
> the outbox collection.
> * A LocalFolders class takes care of creating the outbox and sent-mail
> collections for the first time, and can be used later to access these
> collections.  It will also have an Inbox folder for POP3, but that is
> unrelated to this project.  The class will reside in
> kdepimlibs/akonadi/kmime unless someone suggests a better location (perhaps
> in kdepim/akonadi/resources somewhere?)

Sounds Ok to me overall, nice summary. Now I'll see what the others wrote in 
response to this.

Regards,
Thomas


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-pim/attachments/20090503/a16d27ec/attachment.sig>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/