sorry about that. (i was the maintainer in the years up until mark's
death.) the ruinously bad property of uw-imap's MH implementation, which
i could not fix due to an impedance mismatch between the protocol and
the MH message number definition, is that whenever you refile a message,
both folders have to be fully rescanned.
I just want to say up front that I think Maildir support in nmh would be
great; I'm all for it, and nothing I plan on doing would preclude that.
It's even on my personal "to-do" list (it's WAY down there, so don't
let me stop anyone else from doing it). But .... I want to point out
something. If your goal is to be able to do something like:
% pick -from "Paul Vixie" +/path/to/maildir
And "/path/to/maildir" is managed by an IMAP server, ok, that's
easy-ish. But if you want to do:
% refile 38 +/path/to/maildir
On that same IMAP-managed directory ... well, what exactly HAPPENS there
is a bit unclear to me. Specifically, the IMAP servers I've looked at
(Cyrus-IMAP and Dovecot are the ones talked about here) all maintain
their own index into the Maildir directory. If we put a new file in
their mailbox without updating the index, what exactly will happen?
If they figure it out, great; that will be a performance hit when the
directory is rescanned, but I think we'd all be able to live with that.
But if the IMAP server doesn't figure that out, then that means Maildir
support is not quite as useful as one would hope. In theory we could
update the Dovecot/Cyrus-IMAP index, but that means things get more
complicated. This is related to the impedence mismatch problem you
mentioned, but I think it's a bit larger ... AFAICT you need to maintain
an external cache with Maildir because you need to map Maildir names to
your internal mailbox namespace no matter if you're nmh, an IMAP server,
or some other kind of MUA. What happens when you want to access the
same mailbox with different tools that maintain their own indexes is a
bit undefined (and is well outside of the Maildir specification).
These are all solvable problems, but I just want to point out that getting
Maildir support doesn't necessarily give you everything you think you
might get. At least, that's my current understand of things; I welcome
corrections!
--Ken
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