Mailbox format

I'll start with the annoyance, so its more likely to be read, then go on
to the preamble leading up to it:

  Linux annoyance for the list: lack of pluggable abstractions in the
  desktop for things like "Editor", "Speller", "Web" and "Mail" which
  all other applications invoke when they need one of these services.

And now, the preamble:

> I wrote "From starts with a >?". You are most likely to see
> ">From starts with a >?". This is due to the "must remember to think
> before I type" format called mbox. It separates messages with lines
> starting with "From sender date", so that you don't get to start lines 
> with "From" in your message bodies. Your friendly, ever-so-foresightly
> written mailer replaces it with ">From", for your convenience.

I remember playing with this a while back. I think some mailers are
intelligent and strip the > for display. The useful thing though is a
commonly accepted format. Until we have some better commonly accepted
format, thats what will stay.

Having such a format is a great benefit though, as it means I can mix and
match mail clients depending on whether I'm after speed, remote access
by web mail (work block outgoing ssh unfortunately, but not https), or
pretty graphics and the ability to read HTML. That said, I also run an
IMAP server for kmail and mozilla, which both insist otherwise on copying
the mail to their local storage making it unavailable to other programs.
IMAP would satisfy the "common interface to mail" requirements.

It is one thing that Windows does have in principle, though I'm not
sure how effectively it works. There is presumably (correct me if I'm
wrong), an interface called "Mail" and an interface called "Web" and
an interface called "Spell Checker". UNIX has the PAGER and EDITOR and
similar environment variables to do the same things, but they are not
suitable for GUI apps. It also has de-facto interfaces such as mbox
and /usr/lib/sendmail which other mailers implement to be compatible.
Bonobo I think attempted this at the GUI level. The problem is getting a
large group of independant programmers to agree on the interfaces to use.

The promise if it works is a good one, and I don't think even Windows
delivers it. You should be able to plug in your own personal favourite
implementations of Editor, Mailer, Spell Checker, Web Browser etc into
any other program by specifying which application will be the default
implementor of the given abstract interface on the system. All programs
that need to edit text would invoke your personal favourite editor
for example. Imagine embedded Vim, (or emacs if you prefer, or Nedit, or
Jed, or whatever) wherever you edit text.


 - Richard

-- 
   _/_/_/  _/_/_/  _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield    at    ntlworld dot com
  _/  _/    _/    _/      Fortune Cookie: I THINK MAN INVENTED THE CAR
 _/_/      _/    _/       by instinct.   -- Jack Handley, The New
_/  _/  _/_/    _/_/_/    Mexican, 1988.