Re: [TUHS] mail (Re: off-topic list

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Lyndon Nerenberg wrote in <42849F79-D132-4059-8A94-FFF8B141C49E@orthanc.ca>:
 |> On Jun 24, 2018, at 5:43 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
 |> 
 |> \vague-idea{
 |> Seems to me that we have taken the unix (& plan9) model for
 |> granted and not really explored it at this level much. That
 |> is, can we map structured objects into trees/graphs in an
 |> efficient way such that standard tools can be used on them?
 |> Can we extend standard tools to explore substructures in a
 |> more generic way?
 |>}
 |
 |One of the main reasons I bailed out of nmh development was the disinter\
 |est in trying new and offside ways of addressing the mail store model. \
 | I have been an MH user since the mid-80s, and I still think it is \
 |more functional than any other MUA in use today (including Alpine). \
 | Header voyeurs will note I'm sending this from Mail.app.  As was mentio\
 |ned earlier in this conversation, there is no one MUA, just as there \
 |is no one text editing tool.  I used a half dozen MUAs on a daily basis, \
 |depending on my needs.
 |
 |But email, as a structured subset of text, deserves its own set of \
 |dedicated tools.  formail and procmail are immediate examples.  As \
 |MIME intruded on the traditional ASCII-only UNIX mbox format, grep \
 |and friends became less helpful.  HTML just made it worse.
 |
 |Plan9's upas/fs abstraction of the underlying mailbox helps a lot. \
 | By undoing all the MIME encoding, and translating the character sets \
 |to UTF8, grep and friends work again.  That filesystem abstraction \
 |has so much more potential, too.  E.g. pushing a pgpfs layer in there \
 |to transparently decode PGP content.
 |
 |I really wish there was a way to bind Plan9-style file servers into \
 |the UNIX filename space.  Matt Blaze's CFS is the closest example of \
 |this I have seen.  Yet even it needs superuser privs.  (Yes, there's \
 |FUSE, but it just re-invents the NFS interface with no added benefit.)
 |
 |Meanwhile, I have been hacking on a version of nmh that uses a native \
 |UTF8 message store.  I.e. it undoes all the MIME encoding, and undoes \
 |non-UTF8 charsets.  So grep and friends work, once again.

The SMTPUTF8 standard can this, and nmh now too.  There was
a conference presentation of i think a Microsoft employee that was
linked on one of the lists i track.  He also said this, "finally
being able to just look at the mail as it is (again)".  He showed
one in an editor too.  But the presentation could be seen as the
whale of a lie, as propaganda, there was no traceroute, no
signatures, no attachments.  Cool and so, but not very realistic.

I do not want to look at the plain source of a mail message in
almost all cases.  It is otherwise mostly for development.
Therefore i am having trouble to understand all this, i mean,
i need a PDFviewer to look into a PDF, [..etc...], just the same
is true for email.  Maybe because i like MBOX a lot, it is just
a database, a single file, that i can easily take and move.
I have never understood why people get excited about Maildir, you
have trees full of files with names which hurt the eyes, and they
miss a From_ line (and are thus not valid MBOX files, i did not
miss that in the other mail).
Despite that, having a possibility to look easily i miss much.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)