Re: Storing email on Kubuntu/OpenQM

Peter McMurray wrote:
I can see that it is quite straight forward to save an email as text from
Outlook Express - presumably other mail packages do a similar thing - but
how do you intend to deal with attachments?

Pulling email into a GUI client and then exporting it to a database is
certainly not the most efficient way to do this...

Binary objects in email items are MIME encoded, which essentially
means all of the non-printable bytes are translated into printable
ASCII chars for easy transport. So attachments aren't binary, and if
you wanted to store them in MV it's as straightforward as storing any
other text.


hbkeultjes wrote:

Although I have been on the Richard Stallman's rant "NO Word
Attachments!!" for a long time and I do not use html email, has not
Pick had the ability to store blobs for a long long time?

Yes but the next question is why anyone would want to store a blob in
MV? You can't query the blob. You can't print it without exporting
it somewhere first. The only benefit I see is that an MV backup would
save all text and binary data in one shot. In my experience, and YMMV
of course, binary data in the MV file system has done nothing but
bloat the environment, slow it down when I'm doing system-wide
searches, and increase save time of more relevant data.

My approach is to store links to the file system (relative to some
base location rather than hardcoding to an absolute location). So for
a digital signature or corporate logo for example, I just store the
filename like 12345 or custco. If the application needs the signature
it gets the path from a table and appends the file name and standard
extension, resulting in:
customers/signatures/12345.SIG
customers/logos/custco.jpg

I actually wrote an Outlook macro that does this for email attachments
as well, and I export documents and images to a directory rather than
having them bloat my Outlook files. (You can find similar macros on
the Net.) This is particularly helpful when automated backup
processes email tar images to me. The point here is that even in an
email client it often doesn't make sense to store binaries inline.

As far as Word or HTML in email, that is such a "last decade"
discussion. I haven't heard anyone even mention a preference on this
in years. I am neither a fan nor an enemy of Word or HTML, they
simply "are" and your refusal to use these standard media formats only
limits the number of trading partners you can have. You can open Word
and Excel with open source products and services. These days it's
just silly to draw lines in the sand like this.

Having said all that, I do not personally like of HTML in forums where
there is no need for a rich presentation, and I frequently switch to
text view before responding to HTML forum postings. (In CDP, by
preference, I never even see HTML or attachments.)


This brings me back to the OpenQM issue. When it was Open Sourced it
was with the intention and the hope that it would be a two-way street
and certainly Tom DeLombarde has done that. This is the kind of
application that could give OpenQM and Pick much wider exposure by
letting it function as an Entity database in the much bigger KDE
environment so I am hoping that others will join me in this
experiment, especially if you are will to use SIDUX/KDE or Debian
stable with KDE. The reason I am trying to use SIDUX is because it
has a specific AMD-64 version eliminates a lot of code that is Intel
specific and other junk that are just pathways for hackers to get in.

So much to comment on...

Why is the KDE desktop in any way related to a server application?

It's amazing that the Linux market is so factionalized that people are
choosing a version of the OS to suit their desktop and CPU
preferences. It seems like "open" these days means "open to working
on a specific distro". So rather than arguing about Linux and
Windows, we now have people arguing about all of the incompatible
versions of Linux out there. Have fun.

You also assume that you're going to get code for free and open source
because you are using a FOSS platform. Dream on.

BTW, Sid is by definition an "unstable" subset of Debian. How
esoteric can you get. Fer gosh sakes man, if you're going to ask
someone else to write software for you, for free, at least target a
stable platform.

Especially as things like Palm and Blackberry's are becoming more
popular, the extremely compact Pick database concept could find a
reentry into the main stream market and OpenQM is, as far as I know,
the only version that is acceptable to the Open Source community.

Well, QM doesn't run on Palm or BlackBerry. Palm and BlackBerry users
are paying for their services and there's no direct correlation
between those for-fee services/devices and preferences for open
source.

I'm sorry, but we have another non-sequiter topic here...

T
.

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