[celeste] moving from Communicator to Celeste....

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Nov 1 08:44:06 UTC 2001


> It seems to me (maybe incorrectly) that Celeste would need to do 
> similarly to other clients in that the mail file needs to be broken up 
> into multiple files, generally according to the mailbox scheme set up by 
> the user.
> 

It might turn out this way, but I'm hoping that you don't have to.

If you do have to split the database, then I prefer the way that John
Maloney has suggested: divide by time.  Have a 1999 database, a 2000
database, etc.  I know that personally, I rarely retrieve mesages older
than a few months back, but it's not so infrequent that I'll want to
retrieve a message when I've forgotten what category it was in.


Incidentally, the UI isn't very helpful if you have multiple databases.
You can do "Celeste openOn: 'mail2000'", but then each Celeste window
will be independent.


> I asked my wife the other day what it would take to get her away from 
> Eudora. She's open to such a move but it would have to be reasonably 
> feature equivalent and user friendly. She and my children are currently 
> on Macs.

We definitely need more hacker types to play with it before Jo Blows are
set loose on it--email is one of the last things on a computer that you want
to be difficult!  In particular, it would be great to have suggestions on
just what non-techies would like to see.

Alan's suggestion of a side-by-side comparison with Eudora sounds
like it would be enlightening.



> Being able to import or use standard mbox format mailboxes would be 
> great. I frequently join mailing lists which have either downloadable 
> archives or archives available from the mail server. It would be nice 
> for Celeste to handle that.

Celeste can read and append to Unix-format mailboxes, which Eudora also
uses (or at least used to use).  More formats would certainly be nice,
though.




-Lex




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