paul@cacilj.UUCP (Paul Close) (06/15/89)
I have some suggestions for improving elm.
1) In trying to maintain a Mail directory I often wish the mail aliases
included some notion of where to save the message. For example, I might
alias H82273YZ@HITHERE.BITNET to 'joe'. Unfortunately, every message I send
to 'joe' gets saved in =h82273yz, rather than =joe. In other cases, I know
that mail sent to 'postmaster@uunet' should be saved in =rick, since Rick
Adams is who I associate all my uunet mail with. This mail actually gets
saved in =postmaster--hardly a unique name.
This is a rather large (and potentially thorny) issue, and any solutions
should be carefully discussed.
My solution would be to keep a list, much like the alias list, relating user
and/or system names to mailbox names. Perhaps this could be incorporated into
the alias mechanism. The 'alias current message' mechanism would certainly be
desirable.
2) Some users at my site like to keep inbound and outbound mail separate.
They would like incoming saved as =user, and outgoing saved as =to.user, or
some such scheme.
3) Elm is based on the premise that screen-oriented is good. I agree with
this. When I change mailboxes, it would be very nice to choose a mailbox in a
screen-oriented fashion. Even something like filename completion (a la
emacs) would be an improvement. If issue 1) were dealt with, it should be
possible to choose from a list of users as well as mailbox names.
4) Since I keep unresolved mail in my mailbox, the output from 'frm' can be
rather long. What I would like is an option to display only new mail.
I am more than willing to work on any or all of these, but I don't want to
duplicate any effort. I know there's a group of elm developers, so I suppose
any work should be done through them. Am I right?
--
Paul Close paul@cacilj.CTS.COM ...!{uunet, ucsd, crash}!cacilj!paul
The Obi-wan Kenobi method: "Use the Source, Luke" -Jim Fulton