Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

Gleef wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Warren Young wrote:
> Ext2 Filesystem specifics aside (not all GNOME users use Ext2), MTA's

True, but it's probably the most limited filesystem on systems that
GNOME runs on, so if we design for that, we'll have a mailer that runs
on everything.

> generally use one of two different schemes to store their messages:
>   * One file per folder, many messages per folder (Sendmail, Sendmail Pro)
>   * One file per message, one directory per folder (QMail, Post.Office)
> 
> IMHO, any decent mail client should support both.  If we have to pick one
> to start with, pick the one file per folder, since Sendmail is the most
> popular MTA, particularly with Free systems.  

There's some logic to that, and perhaps we could have compatibility
modules, but shouldn't we at least look at alternate systems?  It's time
to stop chasing the taillights of other systems and start coming up with
something better.  Let's not forget that Sendmail was invented in 1980,
the heydays of the VAX 11/780 and UNIX version 7.

Besides, we're not trying to replace the MTA, but the MUA, or at least
that's what I _thought_ we were doing.
-- 
= Warren -- http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/
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