[Ifile-discuss] Re: Maildir format

[Jack Bertram]

* clemens fischer <address@hidden> [030515 12:04]:
 
[ snip lots of useful tips to improve my kludges ]

Thanks for these - it's always useful to get hints and tips on 
(much) better shell programming.

> now wait a minute!  this cannot possibly be maildir-format!  what is
> maildir for if you cancel it's biggest advantage and allow changing
> messages within one of its subdirs??  maildirs accumulate new messages
> using a time-stamped name in ./tmp/, rename(2) them into ./new/ with
> applications moving them from ./new/ to ./cur/ when finished.  it
> doesn't make any sense to operate on messages inside any of these
> directories!  please tell me what software does that, for me to avoid
> it in the future.

You're quite right. - my approach was very kludgy by avoiding Maildir
delivery and operating directly on the messages within the folders.

To do it properly, you'd use some command-line tool which knew how to
handle Maildir messages (by name, or something).  I have no idea whether
or not such a thing exists.

One of the major reasons I use mbox is so that I can directly manipulate
my mbox files with shell scripts etc, when I need to.

To the OP (Brett?): sounds like you should avoid using my scripts like
the plague if you're using Maildir.

all the best,

jack