Some food for thought

[Jan Gentsch <gentsch ifm uni-hamburg de>]

I´ve been following the discussions about filtering etc as a sidetrack.
I have the feeling the problems pointed out, aren´t all that difficult
to solve.
Please note I haven´t had a look at balsa sources at all, however I feel
the following design lend itself quite naturally and should allow for
sufficent flexability. At least it should be a good starting point for
further investigations.

Some preliminary definitions:

a mailacount -> an entity wich allows me to retrieve
                 mail-meta information and mail from
a mailbox     -> an entity wich allows me a structured
                 view of information about my mail (mail-meta)
a mail        -> what you read just now, some contents
                 with some meta information to it
mail-meta     -> Subject, sender etc.

In a simple setup the mailbox it is a one to one mapping to a
mailacount.
The mailaccount could be a local file, a pop account, an IMAP folder or
anything else.
If you open up/select a mailbox, the mailbox will ask the mailaccount
for the meta-information.  If you want to read a mail, the mailbox will
retrieve it from the mailacount.
In a more complicated setup, a mailbox can provide a view on a number of
different mailacounts, or of course a mailacount can be viewed by a
number of different mailboxes.
In the second case the mailbox should be filtering its view on the
mailacount(s).

This appears simple enough to me to be workable, yet powerfull enough to
allow even complicated operations if needed.
-- 


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