vm team mailing list archive

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Uday S Reddy writes:

 > I am glad to hear that you have looked closely at vm-mime.el.  It is
 > almost 100% Kyle Jones's work.

I'm surprised to hear that; many of the functions don't look like his
style to me.  Also, many of the problems I experience with Japanese
and other non-ISO8859-compatible codings started only after VM 8 was
installed in the XEmacs packages.  (That's not a proof, since XEmacs
has also changed dramatically over that period of time.)

 > There is only one publicly known instance of somebody losing email or
 > having mail corrupted.  And that is an excellent record.

Oh, I'd say I have my INBOX corrupted at least once a month, actually.
It's pretty much guaranteed if you do vm-recover-folder with 7-bit
ISO-2022 encodings in the auto-save file.

 > Our first priority in the current development is to catch up with all
 > the functionality that has been missed since Kyle Jones signed off,
 > IMAP being the first and maildir being next.  Future plans are for
 > integration with Org mode and other aspects of higher-level email and
 > task management.  Improving code quality is not a priority for us.

That's up to you.  But I would put my money on you regretting that
decision.  The MIME code at least is very fragile and non-conformant.
Cleaner code, eg, borrowing emacs-mime, mm, and rfc2231.el at least
from gnus would probably make life a lot easier in the long run.

 > We do have a plan to switch VM from sendmail to message-mode.  Do I
 > understand that you already have some combination of VM and
 > message-mode?  Would you like to share it with us?

In .vm:

;; Use message mode by default
(add-hook 'vm-mail-mode-hook 'message-mode)
;; Use C-x C-e to clear hooks
; (remove-hook 'vm-mail-mode-hook 'message-mode)

The reason I need to use VM native occasionally is that the interface
for pre-formatted MIME bodies (such as digests) differs between VM
native and message-mode.  Since I send digests and forwards quite
rarely, I haven't bothered to do any more than make it convenient to
switch.