On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 12:22:47PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: > > I can move email files around just like any another > > data .doc or .xls files, and I can archive the email for a > > project together with all the other data files. > > You might want to consider switching to Maildir. > > Maildir uses a small directory structure (name, name/cur, > name/new, name/tmp) to hold messages as individual files.
This is very interesting! I can see some advantages to that. However, the grouping of multiple messages into a single file -- a file not tied to a particular location -- is for me one of the nicest _features_ of the mbox format. There are "mailgrep" scripts that will troll through a directory full of mbox files and output individual messages and output just the ^From-delimited blocks (mail messages) matching the pattern [1]. Word processors and spreadsheet programs would never have succeeded in forcing users to keep their documents or spreadsheets in a special directory, but with email, people seem to have gotten used to this idea. That's what I was getting at with "paradigm", which I admit may be putting the point a bit too strongly. To me, support of freely movable email files is the decisive advantage of mutt over all other mail clients. Tom [1] http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/ -- Tom Baker <tba...@tbaker.de>
