Re: Re: OSX Mail app → Emacs ?

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 5:34 AM, Robert Thorpe
<rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> wrote:

>>> On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I would recommend a backend which stores mails
>>>> single files (one file per mail), e.g. nnml.
>>>> That way you can use the shell tools on the
>>>> mails much easier than those
>>>> many-mails-in-one-file methods.
>>>
>>> This is an overpromise. It *may* make using shell tools easier *if*
>>> your mail is all in English, and even more so if it’s all plain text.
>
> Usually, an email contains a header that describes how it's encoded.
>
> An email client that uses mbox will copy the email and header into the
> mbox file.  Then when the email is viewed it can look at the header and
> select the correct coding system.

Yes, and that is what makes mail *work at all*, that any well-written
specialized software can apply the correct decoding algorithms and
access the text within.

However, the original point was that single-message-per-file storage
allows using *general-purpose UNIX tools* on messages. That is not the
case, because they do not have the knowledge of what decoding to
apply.

I am aware that there are specialized tools for mail indexing which
will require setting up and maintenance. Point is, if you have a mail
archive in any format and no tools beyond GNU Coreutils, you are not
guaranteed to be able to do anything useful with it.