[TUHS] mail (Re: off-topic list

On Jun 23, 2018, at 5:18 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: One of the reasons I continue using MH (now nmh) as my primary email system is because it works so well with Unixy tools. I can e.g. do pick +TUHS -after '31 Dec 2017' -and -from bakul | xargs scan To see summary lines of messages I posted to this group this year. Using MH tools with non-MH tools is a bit clunky though useful; I just have to cd to the right Mail directory first. A mail message is really a structured object and if we represent it as a directory, all the standard unix tools can be used. This is what Presotto's upasfs on plan9 does. With it you can do things like cd /mail/fs/mbox grep -l foo */from | sed 's/from/to/' | xargs grep -l bar But you soon realize standard unix tools are quite a bit clunky in dealing with structured objects - often you want to deal with a set of sub components simultaneously (e.g. the pick command above). This problem is actually pretty common in the unix world and you have to have context/target specific tools. At the same time a unix sensibility can guide the architecture / design. Something like MH toolset would be easier to implement if you assume an underlying mbox filesystem. Conversely, the same sort of tools can perhaps be useful elsewhere. \vague-idea{ Seems to me that we have taken the unix (& plan9) model for granted and not really explored it at this level much. That is, can we map structured objects into trees/graphs in an efficient way such that standard tools can be used on them? Can we extend standard tools to explore substructures in a more generic way? }