Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!hao!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsp!gillies
From: gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: "data base" mail system idea
Message-ID: <79600002@uiucdcsp>
Date: 15 Feb 88 03:53:00 GMT
References: <1922@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Lines: 33
Nf-ID: #R:ttidca.TTI.COM:1922:uiucdcsp:79600002:000:1549
Nf-From: uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Feb 14 21:53:00 1988


Re: The problem of losing mail somewhere within a myriad of folders

I know of at least one mail system that solves this problem.  It's
called Babar, and runs at Xerox on smalltalk machines.  It has some
pretty nice database functions, but mainly it provides heirarchical
mail folders, and the ability to enter a message under multiple
categories.

Many smalltalk users manage 10 megabytes of mail (2000+ messages) with
no problem.  They are running on Doradoes, 68020-class workstations.

Every message goes into one huge file, and folders are implemented as
sets of pointers into this file.  Therefore, the text of a message is
only stored once, even it appears in 25 categories.  There are some
standard categories, like "deleteable", "sent-by-me", "everything",
etc. that the system maintains.

When you delete a message it goes into the deleteable category.  When
you expunge, everything in this category is zapped.  Whenever you send
a message, a copy is saved in the sent-by-me category.  The everything
category references all the messages.  In particular, you can do a
text search through everything and the results are stored in a new
category.  This makes it very easy to relocate a containing a unique
keyword.

The system has a built-in mail file scavenger.  It also modifies the
mail database using atomic actions.  The atomic actions are
specialized, so you can even mount a remote mail database on an IFS
file server, and access it transparently.

Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
            {gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}