Offline File Format Import

[Jeff Allen]

Hi, and thanks for the great tool!

Playing around with your code this evening has finally motivated me to unify my disparate collection of online (IMAP, Google) and offline (MBOX, PST -- exportable to whatever format is convenient) email accounts into a single system. I'm sick of not having access to all of my emails in a single, searchable tool.

I realize the project is so young that some of these features will involve some coding on my part which I'm open to, but wanted to make sure I wasn't reinventing (or simultaneously inventing) the wheel, so to speak. Is anyone already working on offline file support for e.g. MBOX or something of that sort? If not, are there any plans to support offline file formats in Inbox, leveraging a local file rather than a remote email server? Same question for address books, though that's less immediately important to me. I'd be happy to put in some work on this if the project owners would be interested in the feature.

One concern I have about importing is the management of duplications. I notice mentions of "deduplicated messages" on the initial Inbox sync, but I wasn't sure how those are managed.

Also, I see a few MySQL tables referencing search, but I didn't see anything in the docs about search capabilities; is that written up anywhere?

Finally, the GitHub wiki doesn't seem to be online. I was going to start a page detailing how I got setup with a custom Google application instead of the provided default.

Thanks,
Jeff

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

+1

I just wanted to add that proving a way to inject GMail mbox export would probably get quite a bit of attention into JavaScript API for people who want to experiment with analyzing/navigating/visualizing their GMail export. I am seeing a lot of unfulfilled interest in having a quick test stack on top of GMail export. And it's faster than doing an over-the-wire sync.

Regards,

   Alex.

[Christine Spang]

I responded to a couple of these questions on IRC the other day, but I'll respond in more detail here. :)

Per IRC, I wholeheartedly support this feature and will gladly give design advice and feedback on pull requests to support importing "stub"/local accounts.

For the deduplication stuff, I wouldn't worry about it---Gmail message deduplication is simply an optimization to minimize data transferred over the wire. It doesn't affect what data ends up stored locally, which is globally deduplicated.

We haven't added search capabilities yet, but have plans to.

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