Pining for the fjords

[forthrin]

Ah, how I love devs paying tribute the classics. However, is this supposed to play nicely with mbox files, like Emacs Rmail and mail itself? At least nothing happens when trying nmail -f mboxor simply nmail.

[d99kris]

Ah, how I love devs paying tribute the classics.

Thanks, yeah after having BBS access to email via Fidonet in early/mid-90s, and then real POP3 access using YAM on Amiga and Pegasus Mail on Windows from 1995, I was introduced to pine (yes with mbox backend) in 1999 when starting at the university. And despite the later advancements (webmail/gmail) I always looked fondly back on the pine days. After the initial gmail craze I tried using alpine over IMAP from time to time, but always felt it was a little clunky and slow for my usage. So eventually I decided to try build something snappier and easier to use (for IMAP) but borrowing from the UI concepts I liked about pine/alpine, and thus nmail was created.

However, is this supposed to play nicely with mbox files

No, unfortunately not. During the initial development of nmail I did use a format similar to Maildir though, but it turned out too slow (compared to sqlite currently used). I never tried doing mbox storage, but it would likely have been even slower (for very large mail folders).

Today nmail supports export of its sqlite cache in Maildir format, but it does not support read/write access from existing Maildir folders. It's just provided as some type of emergency recovery method, should one loose access to the actual IMAP account, to be imported to some other email provider using Thunderbird or other MUA.

So, the only similarities between nmail and pine/alpine are some of the UI / keyboard shortcuts, but nmail does not aspire to be compatible or have anywhere near feature parity with pine/alpine.

[forthrin]

~/mbox is basically just your daily fetch of unread email. You split them by /From /, and then get headers (From|To|Cc|Subject|Date), body and attachments like with any other mail. Then they are deleted when read or moved to some other file.