Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

["Braden N. McDaniel" <braden shadow net>]

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> I read Jamie Zawinsky's interwingle article, and his idea is extremely
> similar to what Jim suggested:
> 
> > * everything is indexed.  What look like folders are just search
> >         queries.  Besides queries on the message and/or headers, the messages
> >         can have labels attached (all your inbox is is incoming mail with
> >         an inbox label attached) and labels can take part in search
> >         queries.

This also bears some striking similarity to an idea Cooper expresses in
his excellent book, _About Face_; though like Scott Wimer's description,
Cooper's idea encompasses all application-client documents.

The general idea he expresses is that the disc filing system is an
implementation detail from which application users are better off
insulated--largely for the reasons already mentioned here re. the
insufficiency of the disc file system for providing many of the
organizational constructs that Humans might want. The database Cooper
describes includes a few other goodies, like a sophisticated document
history system to provide a "persistent undo". It sounds really neat,
though really resource-intensive. Maybe with Linux and Gnome, we're
There Yet. I'd love to see something like this materialize.

Braden