Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!tank!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Faster reading of mailboxes with indexing
Keywords: elm mailbox fast index feature
Message-ID: <1990Mar1.173429.8246@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 1 Mar 90 17:34:29 GMT
References: <1887@uniol.UUCP> <1990Feb28.230830.9818@DSI.COM>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 21

In article <1990Feb28.230830.9818@DSI.COM> syd@DSI.COM writes:

>However, this whole point becomes less important as we head toward the
>Content-Length: header which allows for seeking over the body anyway
>and we do need to read the headers anyway.

I'd like to see Content-Length: handling for compatibility with the
AT&T PMX mailers (attach/detach of multi-part messages would be nice
too).  Does anything else currently use it?
However, it would still save time to have an optional copy of the
headers and file offsets of each message stored in a 2nd file.
Perhaps you could just dump the internal index when saving a mailbox
over a certain size, then next time check for that file and if it
exists, checkpoint the last entry to verify that it is unchanged up
to that point, and merge in any appended items.
If you want something really different, I'd like to see something
like a zoo archive with the body compressed as an optional storage
format.

Les Mikesell
  les @chinet.chi.il.us