On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 03:43:19PM -0500, dman wrote: > Mmm, how does it know which message(s) are unread until it reads > through the (mbox) file? How does it know where each message starts > and ends (to perform seek()s) without reading through the file looking > for a "From " line? If it has some external datastore with that info, > then I would consider that part of the folder format. (if you used > 'mutt' or 'vi' to modify the folder, that extra data gnus keeps would > be incorrect, but it wouldn't know without reading the file, and > reading the file is the bottleneck) > > I'm not trying to make a gnus vs. mutt war or anything like that, I > just don't understand how, using an mbox folder, it is possible to > avoid the bottleneck of reading the file. (IOW, please explain how, > if I were to start making BrandNewSuperMUA, how I could implement such > a feature)
I don't know for gnus but evolution keep an index of messages (and I guess associated offsets) and when the mbox is touched only reads at the end of the file for new mail. If evo founds a problem in its index (per example, after seeking no From is found) then rebuild the whole index. It seems not so complicated and should be possible in mutt (let's code). btw I am a happy mutt user, to keep your mbox to a given size you can do a lot of thing like using the mutt capability to move read mails in an another mbox or like I do moving old (older than a given number of days) read in another mbox (then you keep the current thread). Christophe -- Christophe Barbé <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GnuPG FingerPrint: E0F6 FADF 2A5C F072 6AF8 F67A 8F45 2F1E D72C B41E There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.
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