On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 04:16:25PM +0100, Heinrich Langos wrote:
> Dave, you may stop reading. The rest will only bother you and further
> waste your time.
With an attitude like that it's not surprising that you're confused about
what I've been saying. Read what I've actually said, look for the reasonable
reason this time, then you might find that I've said nothing against the
idea of providing the feature you'd like to see.
IOW, try being less insulting and use a little more comprehension.
> > That's why I said "mailboxes".
>
> ok ok .. just wanted to make sure we talk about the same thing. i guess
> most users don't have huge mailboxes since mbox-hooks are a such a nice
> way to move older mail out of mailboxes after some time. anyway...
But we can't actually make such a guess can we? You also seem to be under
the impression that I don't archive older mail. I do. Arguing that "most
users" do what you'd like them to do doesn't detract from the point that
there can and will be large mailboxes defined by the mailbox command. When
designing new features it makes sense to work to the extreme case, not the
average case (especially when you can't really know what the average is).
> if a change occures (detecting may be done by modification time, filesize,
> md5sum (sorted accending by paranoia)) and the filesize increases you
> could assume that there is new mail (if it decreased you could mark that
> mailbox as "C" for changed or something like that and stop here).
Note that an increase in size might be a reduction in the number of actual
emails. I might have deleted a load but saved one large email from somewhere
else to the mailbox in question. IOW, an increase in size can't be assumed
to be new mail.
> jump to the previously know end of the file and scan how may new mails
> arrived. that shouldn't be too much of a burden for a system. since mails
> usually don't arrive in large batches. (i know, fetchmail users will hate
> me.)
I don't use fetchmail but the above still isn't true. email does arrive in
large batches for me.
> to prevent errors due to other programms, maliciously changing your
> mailboxes and increasing its size, you could check for that.
> depending on your level of paranoia you could do anything.
> from
> A) checking if a new mail starts exactly where it is supposed to start
> (at the previously know file-end, which you do anyway by starting
> parsingthere)
That sounds like a good solution for the problem I highlight above.
PS: You still appear to have a configuration problem with your copy of mutt:
,----
| Mail-Followup-To: heinrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
`----
--
Dave Pearson: | mutt.octet.filter - autoview octet-streams
http://www.davep.org/ | mutt.vcard.filter - autoview simple vcards
Mutt: | muttrc2html - muttrc -> HTML utility
http://www.davep.org/mutt/ | muttrc.sl - Jed muttrc mode
