Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!Tomobiki-Cho!mrc
From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: MailManager
Message-ID: <10577@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 5 Nov 90 03:33:39 GMT
References: <670@mara.cognet.ucla.edu>
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: Mendou Zaibatsu, Tomobiki-Cho, Butsumetsu-Shi
Lines: 86

In article <670@mara.cognet.ucla.edu> iwelch@agsm.ucla.edu (Ivo Welch) writes:
>I have recently pulled MailManager  from purdue. It  is a great  program

Thank you for your comments.  By the way, the official repository of
MailManager and friends is on FTPHOST.CAC.WASHINGTON.EDU (IP address
128.95.112.1) via anonymous FTP under the "imap" directory.

>but
>misses one or two features sorely.
>
>Particularly, I  miss  the  ability  to transfer a  set  of messages  from the
>current mailbox  (or Inbox) to another mailbox  by simply clicking on the list
>of other mailboxes that  I had to  pre-select  anyway.  Instead of  giving the
>list of mailboxes,  transfer/move appears to  want me to type  in the path and
>name  of  the file. Is  there  a way for transfer/move/copy to prompt the list
>of mailboxes? (or is there a  newer version?)

This is something that is on the list of things to implement in the
future.  The problem is that MailManager supports much more than local
mailboxes; it also supports remote mailboxes via the IMAP protocol.
There are two general "destinations" for a message in a copy/move
operation -- another mailbox on the same machine the mailbox is on (a
proxy copy/move via IMAP) or a mailbox on the local machine.

The underlying push in MailManager was support for remote mailboxes,
since a personal workstation is generally a terrible place to store
mail or any other backup-critical data (how many of you back up your
NeXTs with any regularity?).  The problem is that to do things right,
you have to allow transfer from a remote mailbox to another remote
mailbox, perhaps on an entirely different machine!

I don't believe in half-assed solutions that only handle one specific
aspect of the problem.  This will exist in the future, as a full
functionality.

>Another  omission is Emacs-type  elementary editing. I wish  I could type c-f,
>c-b, c-n,  and a bunch  of other  elementary editing characters.  Does anybody
>have a fix for this?

I have been asking NeXT for a long long time to support VI and EMACS
within Text objects.  I consider this to be an Application Kit missing
feature.  I consider it to be wrong for every single program to
implement its own EMACS emulator (or interface into EMACS) with its
own pecularities.  Also, doing an EMACS interface without a VI one is
bound to annoy VI fanatics, and vice versa.

Help me by bugging NeXT to put a general editor interface into Text
objects!

>Finally, a minor curiosity is that the recipient name of  a message requires a
>CR  at the  end.

In composing a message, you are entering text into a TextField object.
This is an object that receives text and upon activation with RETURN
or TAB passes it to a parser.  The parser examines the text in the
field, replaces the current data structure for that field with the
parsed results of the new text, and writes back an reversed-parse
version of those structures into the field.  You will notice that what
you type in is not what is ultimately generated (e.g. host-less
addresses have the host name filled in).

>Incidentally, does anybody  know how  MM  keeps track of what
>messages have been read, answered to, etc. ?

MailManager, EasyMail, MacMS, MS, Pine, and other components of the
IMAP family of mailers maintain a set of flags associated with each
message.  The exact form of these flags depends upon the type of
mailbox:
 . For IMAP mailboxes, it is a function of the server.  However, all
   IMAP servers support the \Recent, \Seen, \Flagged, \Deleted, and
   \Answered flags.
 . For /usr/spool/mail/$USER (Berkeley format) mailboxes, the R and O
   flags of the Status: line are used (compatible with /usr/ucb/Mail)
   along with DAF fields of an X-Status: line used by IMAPware.
 . For ~$USER/mail.txt (Tenex format) mailboxes, flags are stored in
   the out-of-band flags field of the message in a compatible way to
   the MM style programs used on DEC-20's, VAX/VMS with Multinet, and
   Columbia MM for Unix.

 _____   | ____ ___|___   /__ Mark ("Gaijin") Crispin "Gaijin! Gaijin!"
 _|_|_  -|- ||   __|__   /  / R90/6 pilot, DoD #0105  "Gaijin ha doko?"
|_|_|_|  |\-++-  |===|  /  /  Atheist & Proud         "Niichan ha gaijin."
 --|--  /| ||||  |___|    /\  (206) 842-2385/543-5762 "Chigau. Omae ha gaijin."
  /|\    | |/\| _______  /  \ MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU  "Iie, boku ha nihonjin."
 / | \   | |__|  /   \  /    \ Lumchan ga suki ja!!   "Souka. Yappari gaijin!"
Hee, dakedo UNIX nanka wo tsukatte, umaku ikanaku temo shiranai yo.