Re: [hosers-talk] imap servers?

["Jon Stewart" <stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I could set up squirrelmail on charybdis. Would that be useful?


Yes, but I'm trying to set it up for myself. :-) I think squirrelmail 
works only with imap, though.


> > I really wish nmh development wasn't stuck in the stone age. The project 
> > seems to have been killed, more or less, by the savannah attack last year. 
> > It's a good example of how baroque software turns to rubble; they had to 
> > emulate all the stupid little "features" of mh, and now they've got an 
> > albatross of a codebase.
> 
> I remember reading some discussion on their mailing list about starting 
> over completely. There is a lot of cruft there, many features which just
> aren't needed anymore. If I didn't already have a project, I'd join them.
> I rely on MH more than any program other than vim.


Yes, I love the simple aspects of mh. "comp", "next", "rmm", "show +folder 
last", etc. I have the lamest of shell scripts that does a series of picks 
and refiles to organize my mail. The essential beauty is that mail items 
are individual text files, folders are simple text files, and the 
interface is through command-line primitives. The cruftiness is in all the 
weird options, obscure header parsing, and lame-o file formats (replcomps 
comes to mind; it reads like bad perl code).

If I were to build an mh replacement, I'd have inc explode the headers 
into separate files and make messages directories (using the new 
functionality in reiserfs, where small files don't kill you and 
directories are files, too). So you could refer to message 1 as, y'know, 
file 1 and read its contents normally. But inc would also have created 
1/To and 1/From and 1/In-Reply-To, etc. That way you parse the headers 
once, in inc, and the other commands can just look for the appropriate 
files for metadata and operate off of that.

inc essentially uses the properties of reiserfs to create a virtual mailfs 
in your Maildir. The filesystem becomes your database and the commands are 
simple and dumb. If you want to allow access to other mail stores, you 
write some sort of weird filesystem adapter that presents the same 
"mailfs" interface.


Jon
-- 
Jon Stewart                                 Advanced Los Angeles C++
stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx                           http://www.alacpp.org
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