[Kolab-devel] Kolab Support for the Toltec Connector

[Joon Radley]

Hi Martin,

> > 1) How does the other Kolab clients handle name mangling of the mailbox
> > names on the IMAP4 server when special characters are used?
> 
> Please have a look at http://www.kroupware.org/concept-1.0.1.pdf 
> 
> rfc1730 says mailbox names can be atoms, quoted strings, or literals.  Of 
> those, quoted strings and literals may contain spaces and international 
> characters.

On of the first questions you asked me was if the connector supported special characters. Each IMAP server manage this in different ways and all of the ones I tested failed. It was necessary to mange the names in order for them to work with special characters. Now doing this in a closed object store that the connector uses is not a problem, but when you want to interact with other clients this will have undefined results.

The difference between theory and practice :-)

> > 2) What is the 
> > format of the hidden synchronization message in the folders?
> 
> This message is sofar not finally defined. I will make a proposal later. 
> Basically the KDE Kolab Client currently does not support multiple folders of 
> the same type e.g. multiple calendars.
> 
> Please let me know when you need to finally know this format.

As soon as it is ready.

> > 3) What is the 
> > format of the "groupware" messages?
> 
> What do you mean?

IMAP stores the messages in RFC822 format. Now if you have a mail with multiple MIME parts of text/plain and text/x-vcard, is this a groupware contact message or a normal email message where the sender has attached his VCARD.

Now from what I can see from your document and the answer of question 1 you infer the type of the message based on the mailbox that it is stored in. This can be a bit ambiguous.

Maybe this can be resolved by the following:

1) The following additional headers in the RFC822 message:
   X-KOLAB-TYPE: Appointment/Contact/Note/Journal/Task
   X-KOLAB-TYPE-VERSION: 1

  With this the RFC822 message defines the content of the groupware object. The version for each type will help later, when changes to the formats take place.

2) The message is made up of two MIME parts:
  text/plain: A text summary of the groupware object.
  text/*: The actual object like text/calendar or text/v-card

What do you think?

Also in the document NOTES and TASKS have the MIME type text/plain, maybe it can be changed to text/x-note and text/x-task. Journals are undefined in the document. (RFC2445 VJOURNAL)

> > 4) The directory structure used by the other Kolab clients?
> 
> What do you mean?
> 

How does Kolab clients manage subdirectories on the server side?

Regards

Joon