The quest for a perfect mailbox format

Hi.

For some time now, I have been looking for something to replace the mailbox
format, in vain.

The main problem I feel with the concept of mailbox is the lack of
transversality: if I have a mailbox for the mails I exchange with my friend
Alice, another for the mails I exchange with my friend Bob, and another for
the mails regarding my software project Frobnicator, where do I save a
thread where Alice, Bob and I talk about Frobnicator?

As a luser, here is what I would like to have:

- All my mail makes a single spool, out of which I can extract views
(somewhat like the l/limit command in mutt). The default MUA startups is a
(hopefully small) view of "current" mails.

- I can tag any message with one keyword, or several, and build views
according to those tags.

- Views built on simple criteria (from or to address, tags) are built very
fast, independently of the total size of the spool.

- Views can easily be made thread-closed (i.e., include all mail that
belong to any thread reached by the view).

- I can pre-define views I use often, with nicknames and tab-completion.

In fact, I do not use GMail much, but as far as I can see, the interface it
provides is pretty near to what I would like.

As an advanced user, and possibly hacker, I want this too:

- I want the spool on my computer, and not somewhere out in the world (at
Google headquarters, for example).

- Legacy mailboxes, such as an IMAP account or an incoming /var/mail/myself,
can be virtually included in the spool.

- Part of the spool (rarely used archives) can be optionally compressed. And
the rest of the spool should be in a reasonably efficient format too.

- Tools to dump the spool in a simple storage format must be available, for
reliable backups.

And, obviously, I would really like to have all that in mutt.

Do you know if there are groups working on such a project, either designing
a cross-platform mail storage format or implementing such features in a
particular mail client?
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The quest for a perfect mailbox format
    ... if I have a mailbox for the mails I exchange with my friend ... standard Unix "mbox" format with one or more auxiliary index files. ...
    (comp.mail.mutt)
  • Re: excel data to outlook
    ... format, where my boss can read only text. ... I need to flash some new data into my excel and use the ... excel result to send out mails to report daily result. ...
    (microsoft.public.excel)
  • Re: How to take a copy of incoming mail to Outlook?
    ... I would NOT use MSG as a means for message archiving/backup. ... problems with this format. ... How can I save the incoming mail in .MSG format with UNICODE support. ... Can I restore mails if I save mails in .msg with unicode support. ...
    (microsoft.public.win32.programmer.messaging)
  • pop3d mailbox format
    ... I am trying to configure the MTA to spool emails into a single file. ... I believe this is called an MMDF format. ... recreated this format yet pop still doesn't seem to find any mails. ...
    (Tru64-UNIX-Managers)
  • Re: attachments become unreadable and mail turns to winmail.dat
    ... however the attachment problem occurs on both rtf and html mails. ... If I change the format at server level to plain text for a certain domain the ... The attachment problem is however a bit more curious and no standard ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)