Re: using movemail directly in .emacs

[lee]

Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:

> lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> writes:
>> The anachronism is storing many emails in one file.
>
> I agree that storing gigabytes of email in a single file is unwise.
> [...]
>
> In general though storing lots of emails in a file isn't really a
> problem.
> [...]
> Mbox files are very simple, it's hard to get writing to them
> wrong.

That goes only as long as everything works as intended.  Have a power
failure or a yet-unnoticed disk failure, have your MUA crash due to some
bug or because the system kills it because it`s out of memory, have your
computer crash or freeze, have some issue with a network file system or
other things that don`t come to mind atm --- and your whole file with
all the mails may be gone.

Deal with a single (relatively small) file, and chances are that only
this single file is affected.

> You're right about flags though.  Mbox files aren't very portable
> between mailers for that reason.  Another, bigger, problem is coding
> systems.  Thunderbird (for example) treats mbox files as ASCII [1].  If
> you get a UTF-8 email in Thunderbird then it inserts it as base64 (well
> I assume it's base64) into the mbox.  On the other hand in Rmail seems to
> inserts it as UTF-8.  Both work correctly but in their own way.

Hm, so you need to somehow identify such base64 encoded files and decode
them when searching ... that`s awkward.

> I'm not saying that it's best to use mbox files, but the problems with
> them aren't large.  Large directory structures have other problems.

Problems like?


> [1] - I think it's ASCII, it may be Latin-1 or something.


-- 
Knowledge is volatile and fluid.  Software is power.