[Nmh-workers] A useless but interesting exercise: Design MH from scratch in the 2014 context

[norm]

I am suggesting this exercise only for recreational purposes.

Design MH, from scratch, without the constraints affecting the original
  MH design.
Suppose, you weren't designing a system to run on a time shared PDF 1145,
 but on a
single user, multi-core system. Suppose that you  had multi gigabyte disks
available. But also suppose you had to worry about distributed data and
processing.
But, mostly importantly, suppose that you didn't have to worry about
being too radical for acceptance.

What, then. would MH look like?

Here, for example, is one stab at how messages would be stored.
Each message would be a directory. Each  component would be a  file or
directory,
whose name was the component name, Each MIME part would be a directory.

There would be program, call it mhpath, that would give the URLs of
selected parts of selected messages.

    Norman Shapiro