From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Mar 31 10:22:34 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id KAA29762 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 31 Mar 1995 10:22:34 -0800 Received: from mailbox.syr.edu (mailbox.syr.EDU [128.230.1.5]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA29756 for ; Fri, 31 Mar 1995 10:22:32 -0800 Received: from forbin.syr.edu by mailbox.syr.edu (8.6.9/SUM-V8-1.0) id NAA18582; Fri, 31 Mar 1995 13:22:18 -0500 Received: by forbin.syr.edu (5.x/Spike-2.0) id AA01021; Fri, 31 Mar 1995 13:21:53 -0500 Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1995 13:21:52 -0500 (EST) From: Christopher Sedore X-Sender: cmsedore@forbin.syr.edu To: Brian Tao Cc: Terry Lambert , freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Mail... In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 1 Apr 1995, Brian Tao wrote: > On Wed, 29 Mar 1995, Terry Lambert wrote: > > > > Mail really wants a record oriented file system, or as you suggest, one > > file system object per message. > > Precisely. Since we are all used to seeing hierarchical > filesystems, this model can be applied to a mail spool rather well. > Each individual user's mailbox is represented as a directory > structure, where the "inodes" make up the mailbox index. Each message > is represented as an individual file inside that directory. If you > want to get fancy, you can map each message to a subdirectory, with > the headers, message body and MIME attachments as files. Large > organizations could then build up trees of mail filesystems and > instruct mail readers to descend a hierarchy of directories the same > way you would trace from a top-level domain down to the invidiual host > and then to the user. Isn't this more or less what MH does at a user level? I've often thought that the MH model could be extended in many ways to do the above. -Chris