on Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 10:48:10PM -0700, Ross Boylan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 03:32:02PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> First the blue-sky dreams, then the reality:
>
> DREAMS
> I think the real solution is to put mail in a real database; I've read
> some discussion that Sylpheed (maybe) and one other program (whose
> name I've forgotten) can do this.
>
> I've long thought that the folder metaphor for mail is inadequate; I
> would prefer a more flexible scheme for classifying mail. It would
> have two properties: first, each piece of mail could belong to several
> classifications, so that, for example, mail concerning computers and
> politics could be classified under both. Mail on a mailing list that
> referred specifically to my questions or interests could be on the
> list and under personal. And so on.
>
> Second, I'd like to see hieararchical classifications, e.g., computers
> includes debian includes debian-user. Then if I did a search for
> topic x it would automatically include all subtopics. We can do
> hierarchies with folders now, but we can't do the folder and all
> subfolders logic.
The concept you're proposing has some similarities to ideas espoused by
David Gelertner, whose capsule biography will always read "Yale
professor, computer scientist, and victim of the Unabomber (Theodore
Kaczynski)". David survived the attempt on his life, though he was
permanently injured as a result.
Data on Lifestreams, Gelertner's project, is somewhat hard to find, the
following provides an overview:
http://www.fend.es/members/magazine/march97/lifeb.html
There is a set of free software projects which may be of interest, this
page details them:
http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue199905/futures002.html
Among them:
- Yoga, intended as a Lotus Notes replacement ("assuming the Lotus
position").
http://samba.anu.edu.au/gnuotes/
- Casbah, "designed to be (take a deep breath) an application
development, Web server, email, discussion group, calendaring and
scheduling, content management, personal organizer groupware
product". It's modeled on both Lotus Notes and Lifestreams, a
project launched by David Gelertner.
http://ntlug.org/casbah/
- GNU Gather. Formerly known as PINN.
> REALITY
> In the meantime, I use exim to filter my mail into boxes and read it
> with mutt. When the individual boxes get so big that performance is
> painful, I run the following python script to hack the big ones up and
> put them in the archive subdirectory. I make no claim this is best
> practice!
It's close to what I do. 'grep' and 'zgrep' as search tools on
compressed archives (mutt handles these with a patch, but doesn't deal
with simultaneous write access well) is largely sufficient for my needs.
Cheers.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org
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