On 2/10/03 9:57, Lee Larson wrote >On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 09:07 AM, Bill Rising stridently >complained: >
hehehehe [snip...] > >There's something to be said for KISS when implementing these things. >IMAP may not be perfect, but it does allow you to modify your mail >environment the same way that you modify files directories normally. >You normally wouldn't expect to be able to turn a file into a >directory, or vice versa. IMAP has this same limitation. I don't see >this as a big surprise. Yes and no. The mailbox appears to be container. It is odd to have containers that cannot hold other containers, in general. So... suddenly there is a need to have containers-which-hold-containers and containers-which-hold-content. Now, I suppose that you could make the argument that the containers-which-hold-content are really files, so they aren't containers. This /is/ the way that they are stored, but is /not/ the way that they look to the user. > >Is it to hard to create a directory and then drag a mailbox into it? No. It wouldn't be all that difficult either, if super-directories could hold directories but only end-node directories could hold only files. A directory system could be built this way, and everyone would 'get used to it'. It seems that if it is /possible/ to implement the directories in a way which look like a file system, then it should be done. >Moving messages is that easy. It's not as though you have to move the >message one at a time. I understand. Here is the difference. true directory structure: make a folder or two within something that looks like a folder split up messages appropriately. IMAP: make a folder next to the thing that looks like a folder, but make it with a slightly different name split up messages appropriately delete old thing that looks like a folder rename true folder to name of old thing that looked like a folder It just seems unnecessarily clumsy to me. It's not as bad as having to first allocate the proper number of cylinders first, though. [snip...] > >IMAP mailboxes are standard Unix mailboxes. This was done purposely so >different IMAP clients would be compatible with each other -- and also >compatible with most of the other Unix-type mail readers out there, >such as Pine, Mutt, Eudora, ... understood. I guess I'm curious about how the design first came about. > >> Somehow it seems hard to believe that something as widely used as IMAP >> would have this rather basic limitation. > >The limitation is not nearly as drastic as you seem to think. You can >move whole mailboxes between machines just by dragging them. I do this >all the time to back up my mail. I understand. It seems only that this is such a simple thing that it wouldn't be a limitation at all. I'm not saying that IMAP is worthless. This is just one of those strikingly strange interface issues which remind me of, uh, unix. My next question is: Does Mulberry understand an iTools account? Does pine? If so, then it must be possible to configure a server to distinguish between the two types of containers, while still staying in the realm of unix mbox formats, unless Apple has hacked its server. Bill | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be February 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
