[TUHS] mail (Re: off-topic list

[Bakul Shah]

On Jun 24, 2018, at 6:15 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> But email, as a structured subset of text, deserves its own set of dedicated tools.  formail and procmail are immediate examples.  As MIME intruded on the traditional ASCII-only UNIX mbox format, grep and friends became less helpful.  HTML just made it worse.

Storing messages in mbox format files is like keeping
tarfiles around. You wouldn't (usually) run grep on a
tarfile - you'd unpack it and then select files based
on extensions etc before running grep. In the same way
running grep on what should be a transport only mail
format doesn't make much sense.

> Meanwhile, I have been hacking on a version of nmh that uses a native UTF8 message store.  I.e. it undoes all the MIME encoding, and undoes non-UTF8 charsets.  So grep and friends work, once again.

Note that Mail.app already does this (more or less).

I have a paper design for (n)mh<->imap connection &
associated command changes. I didn't want to touch nmh
code so I have been doing some prototyping in Go but
any project progress is in fits and starts....