Contacts and Calendars Standard

[Filip Van Raemdonck]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 01:55:58PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> Around 22 o'clock on Jul 14, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> 
> > mbox is a somewhat crappy format, I like MailDir (each message in its own 
> > file) better.
> 
> I agree -- attempting to standardize on a local mail format is likely to 
> be quite hard at the current time

Actually it shouldn't be. Once you define a location, and two or three
`common' (whatever that means) mailbox formats, any decent MUA should be
able to trivially figure out what format it's in.
Assuming mbox and maildir as example formats, when it's a directory it's
definitely not mbox. When it's a file it shouldn't be hard to figure out
whether it's a valid mbox file; when it's not it shouldn't be hard to
figure out whether it contains mail in maildir format.

Mutt can handle both mbox and maildir fine, and adds mh as an extra option
(I have no idea whether mh mail boxes are widely used or not; I've had
accounts on multiple servers and only ever encountered either mbox or
maildir). IIRC balsa & kmail do at least support these two, too - dunno
about evo without trying (then again, 99% of email use I've seen for
evolution was either as a POP3 or IMAP client).

I'm not sure whether "standardizing" on two formats is an extrageous
requirement in this case.


Regards,

Filip

-- 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question.