Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Mark Diekhans]

Hi Uday,

Uday Reddy <address@hidden> writes:
> No, there is no attempt to get rid of the mbox format.  

Understood.  I am only worried about incompatibilities that
break other software.  Hopefully this is an unnecessary worry.

> Recall that the
> original question was "how can I save MIME-decoded text?"  One option is to
> decode it and leave it in the folder.  Then the folder becomes non-RFC (not
> 7-bit ASCII any more).  

I suspect this will break very little software.  As long as
there is a path back to a 7-bit ASCII, not worried at all.
I wouldn't even be worried about non-mbox as long as there 
was a bidirectional path to mbox.

> Mail folders are much better for organizing, categorizing and
> searching email than file system directory trees are.  In
> fact, I think that in the long run, VM will probably turn into
> a semantically organized file system for email.

Absolutely.  maildir doesn't scale beyond a tiny amount of mail.
For a lot of us, mbox is reaching it's limits.  This is why I
was musing about an abstraction between an underlying storage
format being a way to scale vm to much larger mail collections.

> Mairix is an email indexing tool with a  VM interface.  Check out this blog
> post, for example:
> 
>   http://robert-adesam.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the pointer. I had noticed mairix, but not the
interface to VM, which is an absolute requirement.

Cheers,
Mark