Re: [Evolution] Filing system

["Bruce C. Dillahunty" <bdillahu peachbush com>]

On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 12:17:55AM -0400, NotZed wrote:
> > My concern with Evolution is the direction of storing mail in mbox (or IMAP or 
> > ...) files, instead of a database. The virtual folders are the way to go, as 
> > far as I'm concerned, but is this the right backend???
> >
> > gmail - http://gmail.linuxpower.org/ - has a nice try at this also, but is 
> > strictly email, and I think the GUI isn't moving in the direction I want...
> >
> > No offense intended to anybody... there is a lot of great work here... I just 
> > wanted to put some ideas out for discussion.
>
> I'll let others do the flaming, but well, 

I hope I didn't do anything to deserve a flame... it definitely wasn't intended
that way. I'm just trying to learn whats the best way to go.

> an indexed flat file isn't
> really any performance problem at all (and you can even repair it
> with vi!).  Even less so when you have virtual folders, since it
> isn't actually moving messages around, just performing queries.
>
> What we have IS a database, it just doesn't look like one.
> (and no silly arguments about what constitutes a database and
> what doesn't).

Hmmm... hadn't really thought about it that way, but you have a good point. I
don't think about the gains you can get from indexing (I know nothing about it
except from a user point of view).

Having stuff in a text file that I can access via vi or whatever is a definite
plus. How well do things scale in this arena? If I put all of my mail in one
text file, I would have 100+ Mb (probably more than that... haven't tried it 
:-) How efficient is searching across files? I would assume its probably not
much worse than a single file. 

Now I get the concern of where does the particular message live? 
Or should I just not care? When it comes in, it needs
to be filed somewhere, but it may be accessed through many virtual folders, or
whatever. What's the best scheme for this for efficiency, etc.? Maybe I'm too
far ahead in the game here (let the poor developers finish :-). I just think
about how I would use the tool... in essence, I don't want to have to think
about filing my mail... I just want to query the "database" and get all mail
from joe, or all unread mail, or whatever (using vfolders).

Another "requirement" that I don't see how to handle is mail that goes with a
particular "project" or whatever... some things you just can't query. My best
example is my "humor" file... it may be about anything (whatever I thought was
funny), it may be from anyone, and it may still apply to a main subject (i.e.
it went with my work file and should still be associated there also). My 
thought is to add an "attribute" or flag to a message marking it "humor". Maybe
an extra header? Then my humor vfolder could find all messages with that flag.
What would be a good way of doing this?

Is this making any sense... I guess I'm just not up on things enough to be
comfortable with actual implementation. I haven't been able to spend the time
to upgrade the world on my machine so that I can compile evolution (now
holding out for the snapshots), so I haven't just tried some of this.

Please ignore if you like.

Bruce


>

-- 
Bruce C. Dillahunty
Peachbush Enterprises
bdillahu peachbush com