Re: [b4] make 'b4 mbox' reorder headers so piping to 'git imap-send' works

["Konstantin Ryabitsev" <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 07:21:43PM -0500, Philippe Blain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm using 'b4 mbox -o- <url> | git imap-send' to quickly import
> threads to my email account when I see an interesting thread that
> I'd like to reply to (I contribute to Git but I'm not subscribed to the
> Git mailing list).
> 
> This only works if the emails in the threads have the 'From', 'Date'
> and 'Subject' headers in exactly that order, because that order is
> hard-coded in 'git imap-send' [1]. I wrote a small script [2] that
> just reads the headers and reorders them accordingly but I'd like to
> just use 'b4 mbox' instead as it has more features. However I discovered
> that such reordering is not done by b4. For example, this fails as 'git imap-send'
> reports 'nothing to send':
> 
> b4 mbox -o- https://lore.kernel.org/git/op.0vvmwohypvqxoc@damia/T/#u | git imap-send
> 
> It would be nice if b4 would take care of the reordering.

I'm not sure that's a great solution, as you may be hitting other weird
corner-cases with git-imap-send. I suggest using isync/mbsync for this
purpose. I just added a tweak to b4 mbox that will recognize when -o receives
a maildir, in which case instead of saving an .mbox file, it will add messages
to the maildir instead, e.g.:

  b4 mbox -o ~/Mail [msgid]

This will add all messages from the retrieved thread to the mail spool in
~/Mail (assuming it has the expected {new,cur,tmp} subdirs).

Regards,
-K