The Arcology Garden

IMAP Smart Scoring is an idea/prototype to apply Gnus Adaptive Scoring principles in a way which could be implemented and synced between clients. This is probably a Dumb Idea Done Dirt Cheap

• Dovecot supports custom flags (Custom Tagging messages in IMAP through python - Stack Overflow)

  • * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft \*)] Flags permitted.

• an IMAP client can stuff custom flags on the messages to indicate up/down vote. this can presumably be coded in to MU4E, and k9mail

• A daemon process built around imapfilter which loads up the flagged messages and updates the score DB

  • score-up, score-down apply updates to the scoring blobs

  • inverted index on disk? sqlite? hyuck yeah.

• A daemon process built around imapfilter which iterates over the inbox and applies headers

  • applies that sqlite scoring index to each message

  • writes out the score to an X-Smart-Score header or so

• a set of client modifications:

  • sort on user-supplied header value sorts on that header

  • two buttons to add the flags at the top

This is a lot of development work no matter how you shake it. That said, it seems like it's the least amount of 'code in other places' to support. Some of the code in other places could probably be List of Things to Fund

A wrinkle in this plan is that having the flags attached to the messages will probably cause them to be resynced to the server which will end up being really "chatty", probably too chatty. Could the SQLite database be written to, synced to a client which then does the ordering in a query like SELECT uid FROM scores ORDER BY score