[Re: Email question (part 2)]

[Edward Glowacki]

Quoted from Matt Graham on Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 04:28:00PM -0400:
> What, precisely, does storing messages in a database buy you that procmail
> doesn't buy you?  

Well for one, if you have your mail in a database, you would view
it through virtual folders instead of normal folders.  

The advantage of vFolders is that you can have one message that
shows up in multiple folders, for example this message could be in
my LUG folder and also my discussion-of-projects-i-might-someday-do
folder, and you can generate these folders whenever they are needed
(in comparison to procmail, which you need to think ahead).  I
can't think of a good way to do vFolders without having a database
backend though.  Other things that are probably possible with flat
files seem like they would be much easier to do with a database.
The big one I can think of is metadata you could query against
(assuming you build the database the right way). Something like,
"TODO - due Friday" or "contains address information" could be
fields, so you could run a query like "find me everything that's
marked as TODO that's due before the end of the month" or "find me
all messages I've flagged as 'funny'".  I could probably come up
with more stuff, but I really don't know too much about how databases
work or how to design one properly.


> "sort things into folders".  But then, I don't receive hundreds of messages a
> day and can sort things by eyeball.

I certainly don't push the limits of email either, but I do get
enough messages every day that managing them has become an issue.
And that's what I'm looking for, a better way to manage all the
data so I don't suffer from information overload as much.  I just
cleaned a LOT of messages out of my various mailboxes, but I still
have a LOT of messages left (I don't even know how many, would have
to maybe run a 'find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "^From" |wc
-l' and see... hmm... the answer is 6608 right now, taking up
approximately 12.5Mb of disk space.  I guess that's one real
advantage to having stuff in flat files, you can use your Unix
commands on them!)


-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2@msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier