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Re: mailbox (was Re: intro)


From: xystrus
Subject: Re: mailbox (was Re: intro)
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 20:44:59 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.3.27i

On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 07:58:29PM -0500, Sam Roberts wrote:
> Quoting xystrus <address@hidden>, who wrote:
> > Ok, now I understand your comment, as well as your mentioning you wanted
> > to separate the functionality of the lower APIs from the POP and IMAP
> > stuff.  FWIW, I agree with you...  I think you were on the right track
> > with libmailbox.  It's missing a lot of stuff, and there's no hint of
> > signal handling in it at all, but as far as mailbox access I think
> > the API you defined is perfect.  All the other stuff should be built
> > ON TOP of that, i.e. handling MIME is not specifically a part of
> > mailbox access...
> 
> When you use IMAP, it is. You can access parts of the MIME structure
> without having to download the entire message and then parse it yourself.

Yeah, at one point Alain said:

> OK, I'm in my "Retrospection mood", ... so .. 
> 
> The design is actually quite simple:
> - a number of low level API to handle different mailboxes.
>   POP3 IMAP4 MBOX(unix) MH MAILDIR etc ..
>     Rationale: since they are so different, better not try to mold
>       to a restrictive API, but rather let it be specific to the format.

This is where I started to get the picture... until then I had been
looking at the code in libmailbox, which reinforced the idea in my
mind that the library you guys were working on was strictly for
accessing mail folders of various formats.  POP3 and IMAP are not
mail folder formats... ;-)  At that point, it became clear to me that 
you've switched from a folder format library to a general-purpose
mail handling library.

> But the code that parses mime and rfc822 structures should (and partly is)
> be broken out so it so it can be used outside of the non-IMAP mailbox
> implementations.

Yeah, definitely.

Xy



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