>Then there's the question of a "session": doesn't IMAP have the idea
>of "logging on" or "connecting" to an IMAP store for some period of
>time, and preserving the state of that session while the user is
>logged on?
"Not really". You can have multiple simultaneous connections, and
your clients have to be able to deal with that.
>I wish I knew more about the intricacies of IMAP; I've only used it in
>"clueless mode" ;-) from a GUI front-end and hacked it with JavaMail.
>And sorry if this is obvious; I'm not trying to "talk down" to anyone!
>I'm just trying to share my (almost) 20 years of experiences with MH.
>My "gut feel" is that there may not be a perfect one-to-one mapping
>between nmh/exmh and IMAP. Some things may have to bend. I just
>hope that the implementation can preserve most of the strengths and
>flexibility of nmh: it's the only email system with all this power,
>and it'd be sad for the de facto IMAP implementation to hobble nmh.
Argh. You've got it BACKWARDS!
_Not_ having IMAP support is hobbling nmh. That's part of the
reason it's being relegated to the dustbin of history (the other
part is that the stalled development at UCI made it difficult to
port to new systems; finally, that's been corrected, but the damaage
lingers on). When I first met Eric Allman, the very first question
he asked me was, "When the hell is exmh and mh going to support
IMAP?"
I really don't see why not supporting all of the features of nmh
in IMAP is bad; as long as we have something that works, there's
a chance of pulling out of the nmh "death spiral"; it's not like
we're getting a whole lot of new [n]mh users. When I talk to people
about this, the #1 reason I hear for not using nmh is lack of IMAP
support; instead they're all using pine or mutt or xfmail; MUAs
which all lack the power of nmh, but support IMAP (they're not
exactly given a choice on how to access their mail spools). Sure,
we should support as many nmh features as possible, but the (IMHO)
ridiculous desire for 100% MH compatibility has been what has doomed
previous efforts.
--Ken
