[Email-SIG] I miss size() (and some latest frustration)

[Steffen Daode Nurpmeso]

I'm stressing this list again, but i stumbled over a missing 
[message_]size(). 
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Email%20SIG/DesignThoughts makes it 
a prerequisite for the new EMail package that

    The API needs to at a minimum have hooks available for an 
    application to store data on disk rather than holding 
    everything in memory.

It would be great if the message (file) size would also be 
provided as a public method, so that code-flow decisions can be 
made dependend upon the plain size of a message. 
(The size is known without parsing for many real-life message 
objects anyway or can be detected *cheap*.  True, e.g., for 
all Message objects which are created by mailbox.py.)

It's also so unfortunate that 'headersonly' of Parser is in fact 
treated as "a backwards compatibility hack", effectively consuming 
the entire input nonetheless. 
And *DesignThoughts* treats lazy parsing/partial loading as an 
"interesting idea" only, though i can think about many cases where 
it is a good thing to parse a Message{Headers[/Part/Part/Part...]} 
sequentially.

E.g., why should a spam detector load an entire message if it only 
wants to check addresses against some white-/blacklists and simply 
throw away bad hits. 
Even more, why should a companies dispatcher read all the content 
if it's only about to rewrite addresses and dispatch the mail to 
some other internal server. 
(Of course - hey, it's you, you know *such* more about this stuff 
than i do.)

Waiting is an electric experience ...
Have fun.

--
Steffen Daode Nurpmeso <sdaoden at gmail.com>
:wq steffen