Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

Miguel de Icaza <miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx> writes:

> So the idea would be: every message received (and stored by any means)
> and every message sent should be indexed by their message-id and
> should be possible to access from a number of different fields:
> Subject, CC, Sender, Originator, Reply-To history.
> 
> Thus, folders would indeed be implemented as the restul of a query.
> 
> I like GNUS's idea of keeping deleted mail on the system for a few
> days before actually discarding it (only mail that you have deleted,
> not your regular mail).

(GNUS and Gnus are quite different---you probably mean Gnus here,
since GNUS is obsolete.)

I've been using Gnus for a year or so as my mailer and newsreader
(previously I used it only for reading news), and it's got lots of
nice features like that.  

It has topics, so I can group folders hierarchically.  folders (and
topics) can have parameters, so I can change the expiry delay, and the
address (useful for mailing lists which set headers which I usually
want to override).  (These parameters are applied hierarchically, so I
can set general values on the outermost topic and override them for
specific contained folders or folders.)

These are features which wouldn't work too well unless you keep a
pretty direct idea of which folder each bit of mail is in, I suspect.

Gnus provides "virtual groups", which are views on sets of existing
groups.  Perhaps that's the right thing to do: have the mailer keep
"real" folders, and let people apply expiry and things to them, but
also allow database-type access for convenient reading?

The MIME handling in the latest version (Pterodactyl Gnus) has some
nice features.  The ability to see the structure laid out like a
thread (using the digest-splitting command) is nice.  Some of the
interface is limited because it has to fit into Emacs/XEmacs, of
course---I'd guess some of it could be much improved with a
custom-written display.

Overall, Gnus rocks.  There's clearly a place for a smaller MUA, but I
think it would be good for people trying to design one to play with
Gnus for a bit, to get an idea of some of its nice features.