fmh: an IMAP mh

[Tim Showalter]

the fmh manifesto
25-sep-1996

- What is fmh?

fmh is an IMAP mail client intended to be more or less similar to MH.

- Why fmh?

Here at CMU, we've got a legacy mail system known as the Andrew Message
System. It's old, slow, and incompatible with virtually every other mail
system around. It has some interesting features, but is otherwise pretty
much dead and is being phased out.

CMU is developing a new system known as Cyrus. Cyrus supports both the
POP3 and the IMAP4 mail protocols, and will be used to distribute news as
well as mail.

However, we couldn't find an IMAP4 client that we really liked. So we
decided to try and write one, and we decided to borrow from MH for user
interface.

It is worth noting that we're designing this mostly for the local
environment first with the hopes that others will find it useful, or modify
it to make it useful.

fmh is not MH at a very fundamental level. It is very unlikely that it
will be merged, as we're not quite as interested in creating something that
is MH and IMAP as we are in writing a good IMAP client. Also, the MH code
isn't going to take the introduction of IMAP without a near complete
rewrite.

I should also note that this is being done in our free time.

- Will fmh be compatible with MH?

Yes and no. We intend to support as much of MH as is feasible. However,
MH and IMAP don't necessairly agree as to what things are going to look
like. MH has static message numbers until you pack a folder; IMAP keeps
two numbers on a message, one which is absolutely static and one which is
relative to the top of a mailbox. Messages in IMAP are essentially
immutable. IMAP doesn't (currently) allow message annotations. fmh will
keep state with a background daemon instead of writing it to disk, and will
probably try and keep as little on disk as possible.

fmh doesn't understand MH folders at the moment, and probably won't for
a really long time, if ever. As I said before, we're mostly interested in
the IMAP aspects as we're using a networked file system and saving stuff on
the local disk just isn't an option.

We also intend to add some features -- namely, we're looking to do some
sort of news support for newsgroups/bulletin boards/shared mailboxes, which
are basically the same thing in IMAP.

- Avalibility?

Not yet. Trust me, you don't want our sources just yet.

- Why this post?

We hadn't intended to bring this up anywhere just yet, but since the topic
came up and someone had already mentioned it, it was a little late.

Inquiries are welcome at tjs...@andrew.cmu.edu.

Tim Showalter & John Prevost