markl@oracle.com (Croaker the Physician) (10/24/89)
If Rmail, MH, and VM aren't enough for you, I thought I'd give the
following blurb for a mail reader I've been developing for the past
couple of years. Those people interested in a copy of the mail reader
should send me mail; if there is sufficient interest, I'll distribute
the code. Since the mail reader is fairly large (~5000 lines of
Emacs-Lisp code), I'm not sure that posting it to gnu.emacs as a
series of articles is the right thing to do; I'll probably end up
UUCPing it to UUNET (I'm not on the Internet) for distribution,
although any alternate distribution suggestions (again, via email) are
welcome.
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The Pcmail Electronic Mail Reader
Pcmail is an electronic mail reader originally derived from GNU-Emacs
Rmail and designed for use as a client of the Pcmail distributed mail
repository developed at M.I.T. The mail reader has been modified to
work without the rest of the distributed mail system, so anyone can
use it. In addition to supporting the "standard" features provided in
mailer readers such as GNU-Emacs RMAIL, Pcmail also supports the
following features:
multiple folders:
Users can have any number of folders in the mail reader.
Creation, deletion, and renaming of folders is supported, as is
copying of messages between folders. Folders can be bound to a
number of different mail drops, so that opening a folder
automatically retrieves mail from these mail drops. Each folder
can have its own message summary; all folders can be manipulated
either directly or from the folder list buffer, which displays a
list of all folders, together with their message counts.
user-defined mail drop formats:
Pcmail defines a number of inbox formats: babyl, Unix, MH, VMS,
and NNTP. Data in any of these formats can be incorporated into
any folder with a simple load command. In addition, these mail
drops can be bound to folders so that whenever the folder is
opened, mail from the mail drop is retrieved and stored in the
folder. Of particular interest is the NNTP mail drop type, which
when loaded retrieves new netnews messages into a folder from a
newsgroup with the same name as the folder. Users can define
their own mail drop formats fairly easily, making importing from
other mail formats into Pcmail's Babyl format easy.
automatic user-defined mail categorization:
Pcmail allows definition of a "pigeonhole hook", which is
automatically applied to each new message after it has been stored
in a folder. The function can scan message text for keywords,
perhaps automatically deleting certain messages, marking their
priorities, auto-expiring them, or copying them to other folders.
extensive message subsetting:
Pcmail supports folder filters, functions which, when applied to a
folder, filter its messages, restricting viewable messages to
those which pass through the filter. Filters exist to select
messages by attribute, address, string, date range, numeric range,
etc. User-defined message filters are also supported. Messages
can be automatically filtered upon opening a folder, so that by
default, for example, only today's messages are displayed when a
folder is opened.
Many mail reader operations can be applied to an entire message subset
(delete, toggle attribute, copy, print, write-to-file, etc).
folder sorting:
Folders can be grouped by date, priority, sender, or recipient, either
explicitly, or automatically on open. User-defined sort keys are
also supported.
extended summary mode:
Every Pcmail Folder Mode command is also supported in Summary
Mode. Each folder has its own summary. When in a summary, any
command that changes the number or order of messages in the
summary's owning folder also automatically resummarizes the
folder. The reverse (resummarizing a folder when in that folder
and the number or order of messages in the folder changes) is
supported as well.
message auto-expiration:
Messages can be set to auto-expire at a certain date. When a
folder is opened, all messages set to expire before that date are
applied to a user-definable exporation hook (which by default
deletes the expired message).
user-definable date, folder mode-line, and summary line formats:
Users can define their own summary format, folder mode-line, and
date formats using printf-like format strings.
user-definable "interesting" criteria:
Users can define a hook applied to messages to determine whether
or not they are "interesting" (by default, deleted messages are
not interesting). Most movement commands skip over uninteresting
messages.
supercite support:
Pcmail supports the supercite package via its mail-yank-hooks
capability.
RMAIL compatibility:
Pcmail's command set is compatible with RMAIL's, although more
extensive.
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Happy hacking,
markl
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Mark L. Lambert
Architecture Group, Network Products Division
Oracle Corporation
Internet: markl%oracle.com@apple.com
markl@oracle.com (if your mailer groks MX records)
UUCP: ...{hplabs,apple,uunet}!oracle!markl
USMail: Oracle Corporation, 20 Davis Dr, Belmont CA 94002
AT&T: (415) 358-3400
"The parts falling off this car are of the finest British quality..."markl@oracle.com (Croaker the Physician) (10/30/89)
I've received a large number of requests for the Pcmail mail reader
code, so I'm going to make it publicly available rather than sending
individual copies to people. Several people have recommended against
posting to this list sources of this size (~250 Kbytes, much of which
is documentation), so I am working on (1) getting it posted to
comp.sources.misc, and (2) making it available via anonymous FTP from
uunet.uu.net. I will send mail to this list as soon as this happens
(should be a few days, but you never know).
Happy Hacking,
markl
----------
Mark L. Lambert
Architecture Group, Network Products Division
Oracle Corporation
Internet: markl%oracle.com@apple.com
markl@oracle.com (if your mailer groks MX records)
UUCP: ...{hplabs,apple,uunet}!oracle!markl
USMail: Oracle Corporation, 20 Davis Dr, Belmont CA 94002
AT&T: (415) 358-3400
"The parts falling off this car are of the finest British quality..."