Re: [Nmh-workers] What is MH ? (was: exciting new stuff for 2.0 (IMAP proposal))

[Joel Reicher]

> The relevance of this to the current dicsussion, is that unless the
> plan to integrate IMAP means "treat an IMAP server like a POP server"
> (that is: fetch mail from where the MTA stored it and move it into
> the MH folder structure), which would be an OK (and easy) thing to do,
> then you aren't finished until you have the IMAP part of your MH folders
> just as accessible to all of these add-on shell commands as to the
> (much smaller) set of commands that are distributed in nmh-whatever.tgz.

I think you're confusing interface a little with implementation. Certainly
I agree that what makes MH special is its UNIXy non-monolithic interface,
but that stands even without direct access to the storage of messages.
I, for one, am never comfortable accessing the storage directly, and use
things like show -noshowproc to process the data raw. Besides, doesn't
MH already have support for alternative storage formats?

Adding IMAP support for each and every MH operation is sufficient for
many, if not most, "add-on shell" commands that might be mixed in.

Cheers,

        - Joel