Re: Wanted:MAIL.MAI structure definition

Hoff Hoffman wrote:
More efficient, and less flexible -- it's a trade-off. There are
serious limits within the current design, such as the inability to
generally search the mail file, or to have a message in two folders, or
to handle the information in a transactional format, etc.

Funny, ALLIN1 does all of this and it uses ISAM files for in indexes.

and DECWINDOWS mail does offer searching capabilities.

ALLIN1 stores messages into a "central" shared set of directories. Each
mail area has its own indexed file containing an index of messages. Each
record contains the main document attributes (sender, recipients, dates
(created, sent, delivered etc), message subject , type of content etc.
It also contains a count of users having a pointer to it.

A user has a local database of his messages. It contains "local"
information such as folder, message status (read, unread, whether a read
receipt is requested, has been issued or not etc), and a pointer to the
shared area and key within that shared areas,s indexed file for the full
details of that document (whicn includes the filename where the actual
contents are stored). And a Document can contain multiple attachements.


When a user deletes a document, it decrements the usage count in the
shared area. When that goes to 0, then the file is actually deleted and
the indexed records in the shared area removed. This allows a message
sent to 500 employees to be stored as 1 copy, with 500 records in user
indexes pointing to the 1 record (which points to the 1 file) in the
shared area.

The use of a central (or multiple central) areas (each area consists of
a whole bunch of directories where files are automatically evently
distributed) allows a system manager to manage mail storage on different
disks than user disks.

While the actual ALLIN1 implementation has some missing features when
looking at internet mail, the concept is pretty sound.

The problem with mail these days is that RFC822 headers are quite
variable and new fields are added and not always consistently used. And
one really needs to keep that header "intact" because it is like a
postmark on a letter. So even if you were to parse the RFC822 header
into some fancy XML structure, you'd still need to retain the original
RFC822 header because your XML parser wouldn't be able to understand new
fields being added to RFC822.
.

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