Re: [Nmh-workers] Future directions for nmh

[Jon Steinhart]

Ken Hornstein writes:
> >All of the email about which I care has ASCII subject lines.
> >Also, I often grep for a particular attachment name.
> 
> Right or wrong, I get subject lines that are encoded using RFC 2047
> rules.  I know you think of those as 'foreign languages', but that is
> wrong; they are just 'characters'.  Also, if you talk to anyone younger
> than 25 you're going to be getting a fair number of emoji.  It's fair to
> say that you don't care about that stuff, but I think as younger people
> get older they are going to consider things like emoji as 'normal', and
> it's something that we have to deal with.  Again, it's fine if you want
> to just send and receive email between old farts, but I would kindly
> suggest that's not appropriate for everyone.

I do have teenagers.  It's not an issue, because email is a last resort
for them.  Maybe we need support for instagram as a mail store :-)

> >Glad to hear it.  Never got any feedback on 'em so it's cool to hear that
> >people are using them.
> 
> We had a big discussion about them based on Jarrad's work with his
> MIME hooks (we had never really laid down how locking was supposed to
> work with them).

Must have missed that.  But in any case, it sounds like it supports my
request that the hooks be made more robust.
 
> >I'm a bit confused here.  I use nmh because I can reach the command store
> >via the command line.  What other way is their to use it?  And other
> >programs can operate on the mail store, which is part of what makes it
> >great.
> 
> I believe Paul is saying that he wants to have the command-line power of
> nmh work on mail stores he shares with other MUAs.  To me, that is
> an admirable goal.

Yes, I get it now that Paul has clarified it.

> It is KIND of true that a subset of MUAs can sort-of operate on a MH
> mail store, but that's only true if basically you disregard any sort
> of support for sequences and locking.  And I don't see that support
> becoming more common, as MH/nmh isn't getting many new adherents because
> of (among other things) lousy MIME support.  From where I'm sitting, the
> two major mailstores in use today are Maildir and IMAP.  Paul would be
> happy with either, since he has access to his IMAP mailserver which
> uses Maildir as it's backend storage, but I think it would be great
> if we could do both.
> 
> I understand this may have no particular interest to you; that is fine,
> but in my mind there is a clear need.

No problem.  I was just stating what I'd like.  The only time that I'm
likely to object to something that someone else wants is when it breaks
things.

Jon