[9fans] mail client; general question web vs command

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> Robert Raschke coded a threaded version of Acme's News.
> But that depends on the filesystem hierarchy of messages
> in nntpfs. (n)upasfs does not thread messages at the level
> of the fs. Indeed, it would be a better approach to thread at
> the interface level, which should be possible all the same
> and could apply to Acme's News interface as well (so we
> can perhaps remove a lot of that code from nntpfs).

upas/fs has all the information it needs to do the threading,
and it's cached.  the client, otoh will need to scan the entire mail box to
determine threading.  this can be pretty slow if your mailbox
is not small.  and threading's usefulness depends on your mailbox
being not small.

what upas/fs lacks is the ability to present the same mailbox many
times.  this would allow for a single store rather than moving
messages around.  nedmail is already equiped to handle threading,
since it handles subfolders already.

(for lack of threading, i use nedmail's g/subject/h or g/sender/h.)

> If anyone does this, I also suggest using Russ' rc version
> (ported to Plan 9) of Acme Mail, instead of adapting the C
> code.

this sounds tempting, but how are you going to thread efficiently
in rc?

(russ' upas/nfs is much different in presentation than upas/fs.)

- erik