Re: huge trash

[Matthew Guenther <mguenthe engr uvic ca>]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Nathan Clemons wrote:
> 
> > ObjFeatureIdea:
> > 
> > Pine supports "pruning" of mailboxes; ie, autorotation on a monthly
> > basis of the sent mail file. Would it be a good idea to implement this
> > as well, with a compression option (define your own compression and
> > decompression lines in the config)?
> 
> Sounds like a good idea -- and maybe with it, instead of (or in addition
> to) having a trash folder, a "read mail" folder.
> 

Being old school, I have to do this:

Unix already has many tools that can do this for you, why try and make a
mail client a replacement for half a dozen utilities.  The read mail folder
is not a bad idea, but monthly pruning of mailboxes is something a user
should be using cron for.  Instead of attempting to integrate this
functionality into balsa, why not distribute a shell script that will add an
appropriate crontab entry for the user?  We could also write a nice section
to the manual to help the user to implement this.

There are lots of advantages to this;  It avoids program bloat, it uses
stable utilities that are known to work, and it will behave better with
other mail clients.  Also, I think it will help educate new users by example
on the flexibility of unix and the unix philosophy (lots of specialized
tools working together is better than one giant tool that tries to do
everything).

Just my $0.02 

MBG

-- 
Matthew Guenther                     "I came to kick ass and chew gum...
mguenthe@engr.uvic.ca                and I'm all out of gum"
http://www.netcom.ca/~mguenthe/