[Dovecot] doveadm fetch

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 12:04 +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I don't think the process creation is much of an issue. But something like this could work:
> 
> doveadm expunge -A <<EOT
> Trash savedbefore 1w
> Trash/* savedbefore 1w
> Spam savedbefore 2mon
> EOT

The above syntax would probably have to use IMAP parser.

> doveadm fetch subject "(foo)"

This works nowadays though. It's possible to use:

doveadm fetch INBOX \( subject "(foo)" seen \) or unseen

This works because there are now "IMAP parser" and "command line
parser". The command line parser knows that after subject there must
come a string, so it's not confused by the () characters. Then it also
knows that when "(" or ")" comes in a separate parameter, it means a
list. Actually it would have been possible to support \(subject without
space after \(, but this won't work with the ending \):

\(subject "(foo)"\)

vs.

\(subject "(foo))"

would look identical to doveadm. So I thought it's better to always
require the space.

> but that makes it more difficult to add variables, because if you do:
> 
> doveadm fetch 'subject "$foo"'

$variables also work nicely now without having to escape them.

Now, the next problem is how to select what to fetch and what the output
format should look like. I'm thinking about:

doveadm fetch INBOX "flags uid hdr.received hdr.from body" all

would look like:

===sep
flags: \seen \draft $Label1
uid: 1234
hdr:
Received: stuff
Received: more stuff
From: tss at iki.fi

body:
message body
..
===sep
flags: ..next message..
===sep

The ===sep is a randomly generated separator string that begins always
with "===", optionally it could be given as parameter. I was wondering
about how to return hdr.* fields, if they should be returned separately
or all in one "hdr". Otherwise separate fields would be nice, but if the
header exists multiple times, it's not so clear anymore how it should be
written. So if there's a single hdr then it's at least easy to
understand that it ends with an empty line.

Besides the example parameters above there could be "hdr" = full header
and "text" = alias for "hdr body".

It would be nice also to support something like:

doveadm search INBOX from tss at iki.fi

doveadm next|less
doveadm next|less
..etc..

So the "next" would return the next matching message based on the
previous search. I'm not really sure where the state could be kept
though. Would be nice if it was terminal-specific, and would be nice if
it didn't write any temporary files.
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