🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently had an idea for a new kind of User Agent mail program.  I'd
like to see if I can develop it somehow into a research project that
could form the basis for my Ph.D. dissertation.  (The bare idea, all by
itself, doesn't appear to be substantive enough.)

Although this topic doesn't specifically concern mail headers or trans-
port protocols, I am including the "comp.mail.headers" newsgroup because
I want to be particularly sure of reaching people on the Internet (via
the HEADER-PEOPLE mailing list) who are familiar with non-UNIX computing
environments.

First, some background.

Many existing systems (such as Berkeley Mail and MH) work along a "fil-
ing cabinet" model.  That is, the user selects a "folder" of messages
and can then examine the contents of that folder.  (Whether the "fol-
ders" are implemented as single files, as in Berkeley Mail, or as direc-
tories, as in MH, is not really crucial to the concept.)  Incoming mail
goes into a special "in-box" folder, which is generally the folder the
user selects by default.  Mail can be kept in the folder, moved to
another folder, or deleted entirely.

The "filing cabinet" model, I feel, starts to break down when one deals
with large amounts of mail.  The main problem is that there is usually
no good way to locate a given piece of mail, unless the user can remem-
ber which folder he filed it in.

The idea I had was to take all of one's incoming mail and put it into a
information retrieval system.  Messages could then be searched for by
any of a number of criteria (dates, addresses, subject, user-assigned
keywords, etc.).  The kinds of searches available would be limited only
by the resources available to do the indexing and the searching.

This concept is similar in some respects to the "keyword-based news"
system proposed by Brad Templeton some years ago (though I'm not saying
that it is the same as Brad's idea).

Especially if one considers recent developments in personal filing sys-
tems (e.g., Hypercard), it seems like an "information-retrieval-model"
mail management system should be feasible.  When I proposed the idea to
a graduate seminar here at UCLA a couple of weeks ago, one participant
commented that my idea could probably be implemented in a couple of days
using Hypercard or other similar tools (and would, as a result, not be
very interesting as original research).  Yet, as far as I've been able
to discover so far in the course of my reading, no one has done this.

Is anyone out there on the net aware of a mail system that does the
kinds of things I am suggesting here?  If in fact it hasn't been done,
is there some major "show-stopper" problem that has kept it from being
done?  Although I wish the answer were simply that no one had ever
thought of doing this kind of thing before me, I doubt this is the case.

I freely confess to a certain amount of "UNIX myopia", and would partic-
ularly like to hear about e-mail management tools that are radically
different from those customarily used on most UNIX systems.

-- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683
	3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA
	wales@CS.UCLA.EDU           ...!(ucbvax,rutgers)!ucla-cs!wales
"Sir, there is a multilegged creature crawling on your shoulder."