Re: gmail-like mail backend?

[David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>]

Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp> writes:

> I've come to really like the gmail notion of "groups" (really called
> "labels") actually just being views into a big pool of messages, so that
> a single message can easily exist in many groups, and things that happen
> to that message (mark it as read, delete it) are immediately visible in
> all relevant groups.  Another nice thing (in general) is that it ends to
> operate on threads as a whole, rather than individual messages; e.g., if
> you add a particular "label" to a thread, subsequent replies that arrive
> in that same thread show up in all relevant labels/groups, without the
> need to add classify them.  Moving threads around is very lightweight.
>
> I wonder how hard would it be to have somethings niceness in gnus?
>
> Gnus already has the notion of crossposts from news, but the pervasive
> use of group-specific article-number ranges seems somewhat problematic.
>
> Anyway just food for thought.  I like using Emacs to read email a lot
> more than using a web-browser, but Gnus is seeming a bit clunky at the
> moment compared to gmail...

Something like this has been a biggie on my list of desired features
for a long time, even before gmail came out.  It's a bit more
complicated in Gnus I think, because you don't have the benefit of
actually having a single pool of messages -- they're scattered across
local stores, IMAP servers, and NNTP servers.  But it's a worthy goal
anyway.  Unfortunately I haven't been able to learn enough about Gnus
to approach hacking it at that level... yet.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com