Ken Hornstein wrote:
in that world, inc would speak Maildir format
Done! inc has been able to grok Maildir format for ... over 6 years now.
i underspoke. i mean inc could only write into Maildir format folders,
and all MH folders would become read-only, available translucently, or
convertible to Maildir.
what seems to have been lost on the other historians here is that mark
ignored MH when he made imap, and that bernstein ignored MH when he made
Maildir -- and both are _better_ than MH for all modern purposes. MH is
now an eddy pool of the e-mail river.
Weeelll ... I know you complained about Mark making messages numbers not
being able to have holes in them; I view UIDs as the compromise there.
mark has passed, so we can't ask him. but my own conversations with him
back when i was trying to maintain the kerberos and MH parts of
uw-imapd, were that he viewed MH as of historical interest only, and
unlikely to influence the design of systems that came after it. so far
he's been right. his UID concept was not a compromise; it was what he
thought the future would need. if we did a FUSE implementation of MH, it
would have to maintain a mapping of MH message numbers visible locally,
to UID's visible universally.
But Bernstein ignored MH because he was not trying to invent a MAILBOX
format, he was trying to invent a mailDROP ... really, I went back and
looked. Yes, I know people now use Maildir as a mailbox, and I think
that's weird, but it wasn't his intention.
i get it. however, in cyrus imap, all my folders are in Maildir format,
and the performance and agility benefits of having so much metadata
stored in the file name, are unavoidably wonderful. MH should come
along, in some form, and partake of these benefits.
--
P Vixie
--
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