[Evolution-hackers] MH backend for storing mail

["Garreau\, Alexandre" <galex-713 galex-713 eu>]

Hi,

I justed wanted to say that I was astonished by Evolution working out of
the box with all the mails I stored using Gnus Emacs “nnml” backend,
which, as far as I remember, is like “nnmh” (or also “nnspool”, say the
documentation) backend, except it has “.overview” files to index files
and become quicker, based on something coming from news servers.

Running Evolution for the first time, and trying “MH” to see if it
worked out of the box (it did) I learned it had some indexation file
“.folder” facilities coming from “exmh” (appearing to be a Tcl/Tk GUI of
nmh), which I ignore the working, but may have something in common with
“.overview” in its working.

Thus, beside congratulating you for a such cool software (as I
previously said in another mail [1], Evolution was my first
free-software user-agent ^^ and it performed fantastic, though it was of
a little bit complicated appearance), I’d like to know where did you
find a good enough specification of “exmh .folder” format (except
evidently exmh’s source code itself), so I could maybe link it to Gnus
developers so they may be interested in reading, importing or exporting
it, since something as big and old as Evolution uses it.

Also I’d like to know if, knowing it’s based on even older and more
standard usenet stuff, for you might be interested in this “.overview”
thing gnus currently use [2] to index files instead of or in addition to
“.folders”, or maybe import/export it.

[1] Why X-Mailer instead of User-Agent? <y8u5pt0f7ejn sdo xxuns g6 gal galex-713 eu>
[2] http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_84.html#Choosing-a-Mail-Back-End