🚀 go-pugleaf

In message <9203092306.AA01860@wendy-fate.UU.NET> kyle@wendy-fate.uu.net wrote:
>
> From the perspective of trying to use any other mail tools on
> your mail folders, I'd say BABYL isn't sane at all.  

If it don't run in emacs, it ain't of use to me.  Of course, there are people
who see things differently, and they should be able to continue to use From_
format.  "Availability of tools" is a good argument for which mail format to
use, but I was talking about which format is more rational.  Here are some of
the reasons I think that BABYL is better designed than From_ (to the extent
that From_ was "designed" at all, that is):

BABYL mail readers can reorder, reformat, and delete headers to their heart's
content without destroying any information, because they can keep two copies
of the headers, the original (untouched) one, and the one to show to the user.

VM's current approach (which is the only efficient thing to do with From_
format) is to reorder the headers and only show the last few.  This is lossy.

If VM were to do header-reformatting (for instance, converting the Date field
to be in the local timezone) this would be even more lossy, but BABYL could
handle it easily.

You don't have to mangle the message to quote lines beginning with "From ".

If you want to add keywords or other annotations to a message, you don't have
to alter the headers (again, your only alter your copy of them).  These
keywords are represented in the file in a well-defined, portable way, and
canot be confused with a "Keywords:" field added by the original sender of
the message. 

The various flag-bits that VM supports are already implicit in the file
format, making the X-VM-Data header be a redundant efficiency hint, rather
than a necessary piece of information (that is, another mail reader using
BABYL format would know whether a message was "filed" without having to 
know about the format of X-VM-Data.)

> I think MH is the sanest of all... one message per file, like Ghod intended.

I think the multi-file approach is good, but there are pros and cons.  You
pay a bigger price for selecting messages, and a smaller price for selecting
folders.  Also, you can run into problems with inode allocation, thanks to
that abortive hack that unix calls a file system.

And I believe that the format MH uses within the individual messages still
suffers the afforementioned problems that From_ does.

	-- Jamie