Re: [Nmh-workers] imap support, and portability

[Jerry Peek]

Though my Ubuntu system mounts an NTFS filesystem via Fuse, I've never
looked into how Fuse works. I also haven't looked into the IMAP+MH
systems, though I'm hoping to.

I wanted to send a note about a couple of design features in nmh/MH that
might be useful in this discussion:

1) One of the great things about nmh/MH is that it can use filesystem
links (hard links, not symbolic links) to make a message appear in more
than one folder without taking any extra disk space... and changes to
the message (like new header fields from "anno") will appear in all of
the "copies" of the message. Of course, every one of those linked
messages has to be on the same physical filesystem; that's how hard
links work.

2) nmh/MH can access more than one filesystem. The primary filesystem,
the one listed on the "Path:" entry in the MH profile, is the one you
get when you use a command like "folder +somefolder". But you can also
access other filesytems with commands like "folder +/some/folder". For
example:

$ folder
DELETE+ has 1 message   (1-1); cur=1; (others).
$ scan +/tmp/inbox
    1  Aug05 To:address@hidden  Software to
get<<http://www.windowsdevcenter.
    2  Aug05 To:address@hidden  Re: a request to use Brno photos 
<<Walt, you
$ folder
/tmp/inbox+ has 2 messages  (1-2).
$ folder @../otherfolder
/tmp/otherfolder+ has 10 messages  (2-11).

I'd hope that an IMAP message store could be used either as the primary
set of folders, or as a secondary set using folder paths starting with
+/, or both.

In case this is useful...
Jerry