Subject: .mailboxlist

From: [email-masked] (Billy Barron)
Date: 19 Jul 1994 17:57:02 GMT

In my discussions with ISA Corporation regarding ECSMail, it was revealed
to me that the PINE development team intents to support the .mailboxlist
file to keep track of folder subscriptions in the future.  This support
would go a long way to solving what is probably going to become a large
problem in the near future.  I have a couple of questions though:

1.  When is this support planned to be implemented?

2.  Will .mailboxlist be updated by non-IMAP UNIX PINE?  For my site,
    it is important that the file is.  When the users are on UNIX,
    we don't use IMAP as we can use NFS with less of a performance
    penalty.  However, these users may be hoping on PC-PINE or
    ECSMail too.

Thanks,

--
Billy Barron,  Network Services Manager, Univ of Texas at Dallas
[email-masked]

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 23:29:40 -0700 (PDT)

Billy,
As you know, Pine currently uses folder collection definitions for
specifying what folders are visible.  I can't say when .mailboxlist support
might happen, but I would appreciate it if you would send me a note
outlining what problem you are trying to solve, and how you would use
.mailboxlist to solve it. 

Also, re NFS vs. IMAP performance: the tests I've run indicate that 
opening a large folder via IMAP is *much* faster than via NFS, although
operations such as CREATE are faster via NFS (not surprising, since NFS 
is stateless).  As for load on the server, it depends a lot on the 
mailbox format.  I assume you are using Bky mbox, as opposed to, say, 
the more efficient Tenex format...

(In the future you'll also have the option of using an IMAP server that 
stores messages in a pre-parsed format that makes for extremely efficient 
access.)

-teg