[notmuch] Idea for storing tags

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:04:21 +1300, martin f krafft <madduck at madduck.net> wrote:
> You might have marked a message 'read' on one machine and if the two
> get out of sync on another machine, you might have the same message
> unread there.

That's a different issue though. With two databases there's clearly the
opportunity for the two databases to be out of synch.

But you talked about the database being out of synch with respect to the
mailstore. And that's something I just don't understand, (given the
assumption that all tags are stored in the database---which was the
explicit description of the case of interest).

> Shouldn't this just be solved? I've had formail+procmail delete my
> duplicates for 10+ years, and while I don't like the fact that
> I usually get the CC before the list mail, and thus cannot filter on
> Delivered-To, I have never looked back.

Notmuch has access to all the information it needs to allow you to
delete the CC version once the list mail arrives. So you could do
notmuch-based deletion now and avoid losing the Delivered-To header if
you want.

> > [*] Though, I think a plain-text file with tags managed with
> > something like git (and perhaps a custom merger) could save a lot
> > of work. Or perhaps a plain-text journal of tag manipulations on
> > either end that could be replayed on the other.
> 
> Git is good at conflict resolution if run interactively, but [0]
> still makes me question whether it can ever take the place of IMAP.
> However, Asheesh Laroia, who has floated the idea of Git-for-mail at
> DebConf8 already, has some ideas and hopefully will soon reply to my
> mail [0], which I just bounced.
> 
> 0. http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2010/001114.html

Using git for mail is an interesting idea, but not what I was actually
proposing here.

I think that synchronizing the mail store and synchronizing the tags
information are tasks that have different requirements, and for which we
may well want different tools.

So I was talking about using imap (or rsync, or what have you) for
copying the mailtstore, and then having something with a bit more
domain-specific awareness for doing the synchronization of the tags
data.

-Carl
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