[Techtalk] new email filename extension

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi,

When my mail is pop'd down from an ISP by, say, mpop, it can put into a mail folder in one of two formats according to how I set it up.

Either mbox where individual emails are stored in one large file, presumeably new emails are concatenated to this file which just grows. please excuse my simplistic analysis.

Or Maildir, where each email is an individual file with an index file.

[digression: why does MUA Sylpheed head its folder tree "Mailbox (MH)" - is that another email file system that i see as "MH Mail Handling System" on Wikipedia? end of digression]

Now, using Pegaus Mail on a Windows client I want to access email on my linux server retaining the Pegasus directory and file structure. Simple. New mails in Pegasus are given the extension .CNM and each is an individual file as long as they remain in the New Mail folder.  When read and moved into another Pegasus folder they are stored in one file per folder with extension .PMM and a matching .PMI extension file to index the first, the .CNM file dissappears.

So my plan. Assuming that a downloaded individual email is actually just a text file the same whether pop'd down by Pegasus or mpop, would it not be possible that mpop (or fetchmail or getmail) names the file with the appropriate Pegasus .CNM new mail extension? That way if Pegasus looks at the server email directory, through a Samba share, it would recognise the .CNM new emails, and then handle all the mail in normal Pegasus fashion.

Am I clear here? Mercury, the Pegasus companion mail server, pops and puts the new mail into the Pegasus user folder where it is immediately recognised by .CNM extension as a new email. Why cannot something like mpop rename the file it created for each email appropriately. I don't see this capability in any documentation that I look at. Surely Mercury is not the only popper that can pop mail that Pegasus can read?

On the Pegasus community site, one respected respondent tells me that he runs a Mercury server under Wine on a linux server and accesses his email with Pegasus also running under Wine on a linux client machine. This sounds like madness to me however well it works.

Who will go insane first? Me going round and round with this, or you from listening to my crazed ideas?

Any ideas.

Thanks
Anne





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so much to do, so little time :(