Joel Uckelman on Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:04:58 -0600 (CST)


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Re: [hosers-talk] imap servers?


Thus spake "Jon Stewart":
> 
> 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.

Well, should we do it?

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