Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!Morgan.COM!dpk
From: dpk@Morgan.COM (Doug Kingston)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: Re: mush and mmdf help wanted
Message-ID: <9007211604.AA17220@Morgan.COM>
Date: 21 Jul 90 16:04:45 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 32

Some quick history on ._ files and the msg mail reader.

msg came to BRL and other MMDF sites as a sample and full featured
mail reader along with the core of the MMDF distribution.  It is not
considered a real part of MMDF which is really only an MTA (mail transfer
agent).  These days we also provide a copy of UCBmail and the /bin/mail
replacement we have always had.  At BRL, MMDF met large mailboxes,
principally those of myself and Mike Muuss.  We got tired of it taking
minutes to start up msg on our mailboxes (which often contained 100 new
messages a day back in 1983), so we added the "binary box" that was
maintained in parallel with mailbox (we had our mail delivered to
$HOME/mailbox).  The binary box began with "._".  It has all the
information that a mail reader needs to sort and display messages.
In fact, it only reads the message text once when a new message is
added to the mailbox.  This makes the startup for msg faster than
any other mail reader.  If there are no new messages, it takes
four system calls (open, stat, malloc, read) and msg is ready to go.
	
I would love to see this facility in MUSH.  In retrospect, we should
have switched to network by ordering in the file, and perhaps fixed
lenght ascii readers a long time ago, but now is as good a time as
any.  Startup would be an order of magnitude faster on large mailboxes.
Basicly you want all the incore information written out in a fixed
format for retrival.  In more recent msg changes, the binary box
reading code has gotten rather careful about checksuming the binary box
and making sure the last message is where we expect it as a safety
check.

I would be willing to work with folks on this if there is interest
from Bart & Co.

-Doug-