It certainly is a feature that opens a whole world of options for sysadmins. If we had a similar script trigger for reading, emails could be safely stored in bzip2 format, for example.
Andy,
That wouldn't even require a trigger. You could add a configuration option that reads/writes files into Maildirs in compressed format. Of course, this would break direct access to the Maildirs, i.e. all access would have to be via binc, but that is not necessarily a problem. You could even make the configuration user-specific so you could turn it off for certain users. For example, I would use compressed Maildirs for my main virtual accounts but leave the root mailbox uncompressed so I could read it directly from the command line using mutt.
I guess what you would do is deliver mail as normal to Maildirs and when the mail it is read via binc simply replace the original message with a compressed version.
Nice idea!
But oh-oh, let's not dig into the details about that. It needs some more high-level thinking first. Huge flexibility often backfires as support requests to this list, and only the fact that we support it could confuse novices.
I can't see any major downside to this idea.
R. -- http://robinbowes.com
