Re: The future of mailboxes?
On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 05:01:43PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
>
> Anyway, I am not in favor of storing the mail spool in a database. At
> the very least, it is a good thing to keep the compatibility with
> others mail tools.
>
> On the other hand, a database _around_ the spool, to cache the most
> useful headers and allow efficient complex queries, that is another
> question.
It's almost serendipitous that I posted a message immediately before
this thread was posted (subject "Implementation of virtual folders in
mutt") in which I said:
> my favourite idea, currently rejected because of the size of the
> project, is to have a program maintain a database (such as SQL) of
> message data (filename, sender, recipient(s) message-id, date) and
> tags, and be capable of providing a virtual filesystem with maildir
> symlinks to the actual messages; would have to be called in
> .procmailrc or similar to tag everything and at every status change,
> but could provide real gmail-style tagging, be very responsive, and
> potentially useful for more than just email
This vfs could then be mounted to the actual filesystem, and from
mutt's perspective, it's a message like any other. The actual message
remains in the filesystem, so it avoids a number of the problems
mentioned in the "email + database = bad" document mentioned in this
thread.
I must admit I have not researched exactly *how* to mount this as a fs,
but I have heard mention on the WMII mailing list of v9fs/ixp being
potentially mountable by the kernel so I'm sure it is doable somehow.
The program would have to apply any filename changes to the created
symlink to the original file, and trying to move the symlink sounds like
a big complication (move the target file rather than the symlink,
perhaps?).
This solution would not be of any help for mbox-format messages, but it
could be used for things other than mail (such as an mp3 library, for
example), so I kind of like it.
--
Chris Witham <christopher.witham@xxxxxxxxx>
Computer Engineer and Geek
Fan of video games, anime, and the outdoors
I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose.