against databases

[Mo McRoberts]

On 17-Jan-2010, at 01:51, Brock Batsell wrote:

> Except that maildir stores its flags in the filenames of individual messages.  That could be a theoretical nightmare with Time Machine—or it could be that in most use cases, flags change quickly enough and then are stable enough that it's not a problem at all.  Just something to keep in mind.

I have a feeling Mail.app’s folder-of-emlx-files is a good middle-ground here. The filenames don’t change, but it’s trivial to turn a folder of .emlx files into a Maildir folder (or even an mbox-format mailbox). It’s also a straightforward format which is well-understood and extensible, and Spotlight likes it, which means messages would be findable from the outset with no additional work.

The most significant thing I’d do differently to Mail.app’s raw message storage is make the directory structure less crazy (and in a magical future world where Finder was smart enough to know what to do with a folder of messages, I’d put it in ~/Documents instead of being hidden away in ~/Library).

M.