The best email tool I've ever used was Babar, which was written in Smalltalk-80 at PARC, and never escaped the research center. There's a Blue-and-White (SSL-88-1) but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. It stored messages in a b-tree, and indexes in another, and was extremely robust, but that doesn't have to concern us here. That wasn't what made it wonderful.
What made it wonderful was that (in addition to being able to handle huge mail databases) it allowed messages to be in more than one folder (equivalently to have more than one tag) with no loss of access efficiency. And you could see all the folders a message was in any time you looked at the message. When that isn't actually true, users don't use multiple-filing as much as they should. The technology was that there was a b-tree full of messages, and each message had a single UID. It was possible for the same message to appear more than once because the copies had different message-ids, but you could tell Babar that they were the same, and then you couldn't tell the difference. The second b-tree was indexed by folder/tag, and allowed you to find all the UIDs associated with it quickly. My request is that multiple tags/folders be done in a way that lets you see all the place you filed something, and all of them are just as fast to retrieve. It's amazing how many messages I was able to find by following a thread, then switching to other messages from that sender around the same time, and then following a different thread until I found a message with the tag I was looking for the whole time. Chris -- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert [email protected] Blog: http://pancrit.org _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
