Re: Wanted:MAIL.MAI structure definition

JF Mezei wrote:
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.

Yeah, through the years we did lots of things. We also learned some lessons. New ideas and products grew out of such.

Bottom line, a relational database is more flexible in the retrival of data. Note that I'm not a big fan of relational databases as a cure-all for all purposes. But for retrieval and searching, they're pretty good.


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.

Wanna bet?

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