RE: Qn about a interesting but slight mis-use of mhonarc

["Ed Wildgoose" <ed@wildgooses.com>]

Wow, sounds great.  Are you interested in sharing what you have got so
far?

I know what you mean about the archiving.  I was thinking about starting
small and say only allowing 20 msgs on the front page, move everything
else to a sub folder?

How are you authenticating the user?  Perhaps you are using addresses
such as username+password@domain.com?  You could put some sort of expire
flag in the destination address as well, eg username+password+30 for 30
days expiration...

This seems to be an easy system to implement, but makes the password
somewhat more visible than if we put it in the message body...

Also have you considered using IMAP folders?  I am thinking of simply
letting the user send messages to themselves and then simply dragging
them into a subfolder of their IMAP mailbox.  Then you simply need
mhonarc to scan for new mail every now and then.  Archiving simply
becomes a case of moving from the "main" subfolder into the "archive"
sub-folder and so you can use normal file copy operations...  Good idea?

Please feel free to contact me off-list if we are able to work together
on this.

Thanks all (especially for the links to other systems in a previous
post)

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-mhonarc@ncsa.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-mhonarc@ncsa.uiuc.edu]
On Behalf Of Jym Dyer
Sent: 28 April 2002 17:34
To: mhonarc@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Qn about a interesting but slight mis-use of mhonarc

> What I have in mind is basically to modify the "index" page so
> that it contains all or some of the content from the email.
> This way running mhonarc on an inbox will create just an index
> page listing the mails and the contents of each mail, and we
> should end up with something that looks quite like a weblog

=v= Funny, I'm working on exactly the same thing.  MHONARC
really is ideal for this application.  In fact, it makes it an
email-updated blog really easy, allows you to do things like add
*old* messages to a blog (I've got stuff posted to Usenet in the
early 1990s, for example), and of course you get to use any mail
application you want, which tend to be far more developed than
blogger software.

=v= MHONARC doesn't have a means to make an index page, but you
can use Perl to do this sort of thing:

  (1) Parse out the "header" information.  You can grab this
      from <!--X-Subject: ... --> and <!--X-Date: ... -->
      comments (I cheat and just assume it's all "From: Jym").
      Then make a blog-style header.

  (2) Grab everything from <!--X-Body-of-Message-> through
      <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> and put it in the index.

=v= I was able to whip together a proto-blog in a few hours.
I haven't gone live with it, because I've raised the bar for
myself a little higher:  I want to make a distinction for my
blog that I've seen on no other, between entries that are
worthy of archiving and those that are not.  That'll take a
few more hours, I think.
    <_Jym_>