Yep, Steve Putz and I wrote Babar at Xerox PARC and it was used
internally both at PARC and at ParcPlace Systems for a number of
years. Celeste was a simple re-implementation of Babar that I wrote
as a graduate student at the University of Washington. I ported it
Squeak, and several other folks including Mike Rutenberg and
Lex Spoon have added a number of important enhancements.

I've currently got a 123 MBytes in my Celeste mail database, but this is
quite a bit past the point at which Celeste works well! :->

I will probably break this into several mail archives by year.
Celeste works quite nicely up to several thousand messages, however,
and it's totally great to have a mail browser that you can modify.
Most important, Celeste has been extremely reliable. New messages are
always written by appending to the file, and in an emergency you can
regenerate the message index file by scanning the message file.
This is modeled on Squeak changes file logging; the goal is to
be able to recover gracefully even from something as dramatic as
a power failure while fetching your mail.

Incidentally, I think it is best to think of any mail reader as
a mail database--the most important goal is to retain and organize
old messages so you can find what you want quickly. If you have
this, then lots of experiments can be done with the user interface
without risking the integrity of the mail itself. 

	-- John


At 12:55 PM +0000 2/22/00, Bruce ONeel wrote:
>Hi,
>  I think that celeste, built in as the squeak mail reader, is a 
>sucessor.
>
>cheers
>
>bruce
>
>Andres Valloud <sqrmax at cvtci.com.ar> wrote:
>> Hi.
>> 
>> Sometime ago, a mail system called Babbar was mentioned. It was said to
>> have nice features based on the fact that messages were unique. Is there
>> any link to information on this mail system?
>> 
>> Thanks in advance!
>> Andres.