Re: [notmuch] Idea for storing tags

Subject: Re: [notmuch] Idea for storing tags

Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:32:33 +1300

To: mailtags discussion list, notmuch discussion list

Cc:

From: martin f krafft


also sprach Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> [2010.01.15.1124 +1300]:
> > 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).

Yes, we are talking about the situation where the tagstore is
seperate from the mailstore, and that they are both synchronised
with a server, or between machines, separately. If for some reason
you only synchronise the mailstore — say because the connection
drops before the sync of the tagstore completes — then you end up
with an out-of-sync situation, because the mailstore-sync will have
pulled in a new message, but not the associated tags. So if you had
already read this message on another machine and tagged it 'done',
then it would show up on this machine as 'new' without the 'done'
tag, because the tags were not synchronised.

The only way to really solve this is by transferring a message and
its tags in a transactional way.

> > 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.

Of course. I hadn't thought that far.

However, there are still benefits to formail, namely avoiding having
to run duplicates through potentially expensive spamfilters.

> 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.

Fair enough. Maybe I am just paranoid about the stores getting out
of sync (see above).

-- 
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