Re: RFC mailbox interface

["M . Thielker" <balsa t-data com>]

On 2001.11.25 22:55 Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> I don't know that you can assume that. VFolders are an attractive way to 
> organize mail outside the traditional hierarchical framework--I can 
> imagine using a lot of searches to find the message I need, instead of 
> filing each message in a single, not always appropriate, folder. If you

True, but still I would think that each message would be in at most a few, 
say, 5-7 folders. So, what's walking a list (in-core) of 7 items? The GUI 
takes up far more cycles than that just opening a window. It's all in-core 
stuff, no disk access, no network traffic, no costly operations - just walk 
a glist and make a function call. The function doesn't really do anything, 
it just returns a constant, depending on the folder type. It doesn't really 
need a function, even a data member in the folder type structure would do 
the trick, because a folder _type_ either always has a backing store, or it 
never does.

> offer a tool that allows a user to manage his or her mail in a new way, 
> you'd better be ready to meet the demands that a creative user makes!

Yes, offering such a tool is what I had in mind, when I spoke about making 
VFolders persisent. I think it may be an option to have a VFolder type that 
allows persistent storage of message (meaning the _Folder structure will 
not go away across a Balsa shutdown) or transient (it will go away). Also, 
another flag could govern the behavior on delete - treat as reference of 
treat as data.
The real power becomes apparent in situations where the user does not use 
any other mail handling/viewing/transport software.

Melanie