[VM] Marc Andreessen

[Uday S Reddy]

This is perhaps historical trivia.  While trawling through the vm.info
archives, I ran into a post by Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of
Netscape.  I didn't know that he was a VM user.  (I should have guessed of
course.  He was an undergrad at UIUC and a developer of Epoch, one of the
Emacsen that got merged into XEmacs.)  This explains to me how many ideas of
VM have made their way into Netscape and now Thunderbird.  Jamie Zawinski
(of BBDB fame, but also a key developer of Netscape Communicator) was also a
participant in these discussions.

    So I've got my vm-auto-folder-alist set up to provide intelligent
    defaults for saving messages to folders.  Which is wonderful.

    But, I have a vision.   

    I have a vision of typing M-x vm and seeing vm automatically file all 
    of my new messages into appropriate folders based on 
    vm-auto-folder-alist (with a 'misc' folder for messages that can't be 
    classified on the fly). 

    My vision continues: rather than being dumped into a single bloated
    INBOX, I'm presented with a list of folders containing unread messages.
    From this point I can freely choose which folders containing new
    messages I want to read at any given time.  Allowing me to have e-junk
    pile up in a junk folder to be browsed through someday when I have
    nothing else to do (about the year 2060, I think), missives from the
    boss to be dumped in my 'HIGH-PRIORITY BIG GUY' folder for immediate and
    feverish perusal, and so on.  So, is this just another 5am hallucination
    or is this an honest-to-God revelatory message from above?  (More to the
    point: should I write it, or has it already been done?)

    Marc 

You can find the full thread here:

  http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.vm.info/browse_frm/month/1993-02

I will leave it as an exercise for you to figure out how Marc Andreessen's
vision is supported in today's VM, if you don't know it already.

Cheers,
Uday