Re: Gnus and the qmail maildir format

[Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de>]

patl@curl.com (Patrick J. LoPresti) writes:

  > As you probably know, movemail was later modified to support POP.
  > That was a mistake.  It works by connecting to a server, dragging
  > over all the messages, and stuffing them into a file in mbox
  > format.  Thus it inflicts the brain damage of mbox (">From "
  > quoting and *potential mail loss*) where it isn't necessary.

Minor nitpick: movemail stores its stuff in babyl format if it reads
from a POP server.  Which means that it might be more or less
brain-damaged, depending on your taste: the beginning-of-message and
end-of-message markers are unlikely to occur in actual messages, but
they can't be quoted (I think).

  > I agree that maildir handling should be in a library accessible by
  > other Emacs MUAs.  But it should be written in Emacs Lisp, so that it
  > will 1) automatically work portably across platforms; 2) preserve the
  > sanity and robustness of the maildir format; and 3) be faster.

There's a precedent: pop3.el implements POP3 in Lisp, and I think all
Emacs MUAs have hooks where such a function can be placed.  At least
Gnus has nnmail-movemail-program which can also be a function, despite
its name.

kai
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