Re: IMAP server hierarchy as topics

[Chris Richards <cjr@netpliance.net>]

You are not misunderstanding.

I realize that the file format is server dependent.  With that said,
however, most of the Unix varients that I have dealt with interact
directly with /var/spool/mail (reads and writes to it) as well as
read/write in mbox format to the users' home directories for
sub-folders.

Majority rules.

I have no wishes that the feature be generalized.  In fact, if it
maintained the Xref and X-Gnus* tags, I would be happy.  It would then
be up to the user to determine what other backend (if any) could
read/write locally stored files.

Cheers,
cjr

Justin Sheehy <dworkin@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
> Chris Richards <cjr@netpliance.net> writes:
> 
> > And along those lines, it would be nice if nnimap used many of the
> > same features that the nnfolder backend uses.  In other words, you
> > should be able to read local IMAP folders stored under ~/Mail with
> > nnfolder. 
> 
> I must be misunderstanding what you are asking for.  In the general
> case, you certainly can't read IMAP mailboxes with nnfolder.
> 
> IMAP is a mail access network protocol that quite intentionally does
> not specify the storage format of mailboxes.  It is entirely
> implementation-dependent.  One IMAP server might store folders in mbox 
> format, one might store them in an mh-like format, and another might
> store them in a database.
> 
> It is quite clear and essential that the end-user never needs to know
> what format the server uses for storage.  
> 
> Thus, while users of one specific IMAP server implementation might be
> able to get at their mailboxes with nnfolder, nnmh, or whatever, this
> is not a feature that can be generalized.
> 
> -Justin
> 
>