On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Jimmie Houchin wrote:

[snip]
> I have 10s to 100+ mailboxes hierarchically organized.
> I have close to 600mb and 90,000 messages in mail.
> 
> I would love for Celeste to be able to handle that.
> 
> 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.

Probably not, but that's certianly doable as things stand. You can open a
celeste on a different email file than the standard "EMAIL". If one
conceived of each mail file as a "folder/mailbox" (like in Eudora), you're
pretty close to a Eudoraesque UI. The biggies are a interface to the
multiple boxes (although some hacks with FileList should handle that) and
the fact that "sent mail" won't be unified. But it's not a *huge* leap to
accomodate that.

OTOH, you probably, for many things, don't *need* multiple files. What
pre-LargeList Celeste is brutal on is *displaying* medium to huge numbers
of messages. But you can limit what you display at any time.

[snip]
> 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.
[snip]

Celeste can import several different formats, IIRC.

It shouldn't be too hard to adapt MailDB and friends to use those mail
formats directly. You have to move id handling out of the messages file
(given that it would be in a different format) and that would add a bit to
the possible fragility of the system *unless* ids were recoverable from
the content alone.

Or if message ids didn't particularly matter for categorization, e.g.,
categories became more like Evolutions virtual (search based) folders.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.