Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Mark Diekhans]

Hi Uday,

For me, compatibility with mbox format is feature.  I often use
other applications to scan VM mail folders, such a procmail.  So
it's not necessarily just mail reading clients.  A program to
convert back to mbox would suffice.  Although it would still
remain important for VM to be able to read mbox files without
modifying them.

Although, if a non-mbox format is what is required to take VM to
the next level, it might be time to think bigger.  

For example, Currently I have gigabytes of automatically create
mbox folders that I need to be able to search and read.  My
current approach is to use C program to search for patterns and
then save the matching messages to a mbox file and then open
that file in VM.  Of course, this is very sub-optimal.  I have
been trying to determine how to best address this.

With imap support, VM is moving towards an abstraction between
the lisp code and mailbox format.  It seems that moving
everything toward using some kind of abstraction layer that can
then be mapped on top of mbox, imap, etc, which could do things
like character set transforms, could enable a lot of new things.

Mark


Uday Reddy <address@hidden> writes:
> More generally, I am thinking that there is no reason why we can't have VM
> folders stored in some other character set, other than US-ASCII, e.g.,
> UTF-8.  Those folders won't be interoperable with other mail clients, but do
> we care about that really?  That should be a big win for people that need to
> use international character sets regularly.  MIME-decoded text can then be
> stored directly into folders and all normal Emacs searching functions will
> work.