Snarf plugin retirement

[Aki Tuomi]

> On 17/08/2021 16:14 Brent Busby <brent at jfi.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
>  
> I wondered if it's possible to get the Snarf plugin back, if not in the
> official Dovecot distribution, then at least to somehow build the plugin
> source on a modern release...because:
> 
> Though the documented purpose for Snarf was to ease migration off of
> UW-IMAP, that's not the only thing it was useful for.  Unfortunately,
> every mailreader that I've seen that can run within Emacs -- and I've
> tried Gnus, VM, and RMAIL -- all _require_ the use of a ~/mbox file when
> pulling from a local mail spool on the same machine.  (This does not
> affect IMAP usage of those mailreaders, only local file access.)
> 
> Non-Emacs mailreaders like Alpine and Mutt have sufficiently robust
> file-locking safety that they can work on the local mail spool in
> /var/spool/mail or /var/mail or what have you directly without copying
> your mail somewhere else first, so for Alpine and Mutt, use of ~/mbox is
> possible but not necessary.  But it seems that for every mailreader that
> does run within Emacs, if the mail source is local rather than IMAP,
> there is no other way to operate the program than to have it copy your
> mail from the spool to ~/mbox.  On a system where there are users who
> sometimes work that way, doing local mail access in Emacs, and other
> times use IMAP via Dovecot, you have a mess without the Snarf plugin.
> 
> I realize this is a peculiar situation, so I don't expect Snarf to
> necessarily be put back into Dovecot.  I was wondering how it might be
> possible to build it today though...for any out there who may use Emacs
> for mail most of the time...but occasionally also want Dovecot IMAP on
> the same machine where they're normally using an ~/mbox file for Emacs'
> sake.  UW-IMAP may be dead...but long live GNU Emacs!
> 
> -- 
> + Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys

Hi!

Simplish way to do this...

git revert a02076a2c09a81989aab5f35bda621be86649ea2

and then build dovecot.

You can also extract it as patch

git show -R a02076a2c09a81989aab5f35bda621be86649ea2 > snarf-plugin.patch

Aki