On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 02:07:50PM -0400, Thomas Baker wrote: > 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.
You're running Windows, so that can be problematic. Take a file on my system named: 1252028348.8543_2.marvin.optimis.net:2,FS Creating a file with that name on an NTFS filesystem is a noop because of the ':' character. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx There may be workarounds, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume those are no less problematic. > 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]. The mbox format does have advantages but there can be as many disadvantages. The general consensus here seems to be to rely on mbox for archives and use maildir (by default) for everything else. Mutt has no problem with either no matter how large. > 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. Well, few understand what email is, let alone the storage mechanism. And with everyone running to the web, I don't expect that situation has any chance of improving. On a somewhat related note, you might want to have a look at Google's Wave to see what the future may have in store for us: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html The YouTube videos (totalling about an hour, IIRC), are interesting from a number of different perspectives. I won't summarise the concept or the features except to say that for anyone like myself that cringes at the thought of using a web browser for such things, you'll find toward the end of the last video an example of an ncurses interface; unsurprisingly (or not), it was that interface that received the most applause. -- George
