From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <52cfc303b267b7d8c9019ae8fec6ff5d@vitanuova.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Scaleable mail repositories.
Date: Tue,  1 Nov 2005 19:56:30 +0000
From: rog@vitanuova.com
In-Reply-To: <20051031123213.0E9A51AE726@dexter-peak.quanstro.net>
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> on the other hand, what is the downside of keeping one message
> per file? the upside is that no indexing is required.

i'd say that an advantage of going for an indexed scheme is that one
could potentially index attributes other than message number.

i've never got around to biting the bullet on this, but i've long
thought that it would be very nice to have a version of upas/fs which
could offer different views onto the same mailbox.  one could
implement a clone-file style filesystem where each line directory
holds a some subset of the messages in the overall mailbox, determined
by writing a control message, e.g.  a regexp restriction on a given
header line.  suitable indexing, and a little extra acme support could
make this a smooth experience.

i keep many of my old mail messages around, and it's painful to search
through them - i usually end up using grep -n, and plumbing the
mailbox file into acme, which has at least the advantage that it
doesn't use up all my memory.  however it's not a particularly
pleasant experience, and i'd love to see something better.

BTW, one advantage of a file-per-message format is that it enables
straightforward annotation of messages without relying on
mailbox-to-index-file consistency.  i don't know how others use mail,
but i'd find some sort of annotation useful (e.g.  read/unread, intent
to reply), and maybe this is a possible reason for changing the
storage format.  i'm not sure though.  reading many files and
directories will inevitably slow things down (a quick estimate on my
current 23MB mbox shows that it would take just over 4 times as many
9P transactions to read the whole thing if each message were stored as
the a separate file).