On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 10:49 AM, Bill Rising queried: > 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.
To most IMAP clients, .Mac looks just like a regular IMAP server. Apple has hacked things so Mail.app can do special stuff like make the little pictures appear across from the headers. I suspect the directory handling has also been tweaked. If you look in the ~/Library, the IMAP accounts look like IMAP:accountname, but the .Mac one looks like iTools:accountname. > This is just one of those strikingly strange interface issues which > remind me of, uh, unix. Since Mac OS X is, uh, Unix, it seems like a good fit. I suppose a file system could be devised to do the recursive containment/file capability you want, but that would put some limitations on the portability of IMAP, wouldn't it? In order to create a standard that people are actually going to use, some concession to the lowest common denominator has to be there. This file/directory difference doesn't seem to me to be a Unix thing so much as an admission that this is available in all file systems. By the way, the Unix mailbox structure is stupidly simple -- just concatenate messages in a text file. Go cat one and you'll see what I mean. It's up to individual programs to do the indexing and such. Mail.app does not use Unix mailboxes for it's cached messages on the local hard drive, but it seems to for local mailboxes. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be February 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
