pterjan's diary

  Claws Mail - GNOME integration

I'd like to switch from Evolution to the light but powerful Claws Mail but did not for only one reason : the lack of integration into GNOME.

GNOME uses evolution-data-server to store everything so that all apps can access data. This allows nautilus-sento to know your contacts, the date applet to know your calendar and tasks, ... Now that we have light interfaces to manage e-d-s data thanks to OpenedHand guys, dropping evolution is even more tempting so I'd like to have Claws Mail to use this data.

Let's consider the 3 parts I see in GNOME integration of Claws Mail:

Contacts

I see 2 needs:

• Have e-d-s to know Claws Mail contacts (reading ~/.claws-mail/). If only implementing this, you will need to import your current contacts into claws to be able to use them.
• Add e-d-s support into Claws as an additionnal address source. The issue here is that I think it cannot be done as a plugin: the type of sources is an enum (AddressIfType) and the various types have dedicated code in at least addrindex_build_if_list and addrindex_free_datasource so you can't add one dynamically. So, if you build Claws Mail with e-d-s support in a distro it will require people to install e-d-s libs, and they will always get loaded even if not used. I think there is the same issue currently with jpilot and LDAP. I need input from Claws Mail devs here :)

Calendar

This part is about adding to you calendar the events you receive by mail. That's more easy, vcalendar support is already a plugin so another one can be written to use e-d-s.

Tasks

The goal is to have the same functionality as Evolution's "Convert to task". This one is really easy as we only need the dialog to select the category and it already exists in Evolution.