Re: mh backend

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> > > 1. Message sequences.

> > What are they?

> In MH/nmh, you can give symbolic names to an arbitrary list of
> numbers.  Then you can manipulate the messages that these numbers
> represent, by using the message sequence.  [...]

> In MH, I can assign a compound sequence of messages a name and can
> limit my operations to operate on specific sequences.  [...]

Could mailgroups, or submailgroups, be used to similar purposes?  Maybe not,
if a single message may be part of many sequences simultaneously.  Let's
assume for a moment it would be possible...

> All the MH/nmh will take message sequences as arguments.  Also, there are
> commands for adding or deleting messages from a sequence.  This makes it
> very easy to remove, refile, search, or forward a collection of messages.

A bit like it would be easy to handle messages in mailgroups.  `M P a'
could select all messages from a group, if I remember correctly.

> It's a very powerful tool.  I've always wondered why other mail
> readers haven't done similar things.

Sometimes, there are other but different paradigms which have similar
powerfulness?  It's always a bit difficult to compare different approaches.
Maybe you could define something that fits well in the various Gnus
paradigms, and that would give you the functionality you need?

> Well, it's common to repack the folder in the MH/nmh world.  The message
> numbers are not hidden in the background quite as much as in Gnus.

Maybe (just hypothesising :-) because you often need to look at these
numbers.  If you stopped having this need, probably the need to repack
would disappear as well?

> Yes, limiting takes care of matching on headers, but unless I'm
> missing something obvious, one cannot limit based on the contents
> message body.

For one, I do it with temporary scoring instead.  Maybe it would be
convenient that have a limiting function for that as well?  It might be slow.

> I find this occasionally useful when searching for a particular piece
> of email.

People speak highly of `nnir', maybe it could help?  Maybe it is overkill?

> If I expire them, it leaves a gap in the message numbers and then the
> count of messages is inaccurate since Gnus calculates the number of
> articles based on the article numbers of the first and the last articles.

Maybe the good approach would to have Gnus count correctly, then?
Repacking numbers looks a fairly heavy operation, around a Gnus limitation
which might be lifted, presumably.

> I do think that I shall look into adapting and implementing some of
> the nifty MH features that I've been silently missing for so long. :-)

Good for us! :-)

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard