Re: Rmail changes for Emacs 22

[Paul Michael Reilly <pmr@pajato.com>]

 > > Personally, I think emacs-mule is not a good idea in this case, since 
 > > mbox is not Emacs-private format, so some other software should be able 
 > > to read it.  A good alternative would be to encode each message as what 
 > > the charset= header says (and add/fix such a header if there is none, or 
 > > if the one that's there lies).
 > 
 > I agree with that approach.  I think we can proceed the
 > modification of rmail in these steps.
 > 
 > (1) Divide the current code into BABYL format handler
 >     (babyl-backend) and rmail user-interface provider
 >     (rmail-frontend).  Babyl-backend reads a BABYL file
 >     without any code conversion in an unibyte buffer, and
 >     provides various functions (e.g. extract message
 >     headers, extract a specific message header, extract a
 >     message body, get new messages, etc).
 > 
 > (2) Make mbox-backend that provides the same facilities as
 >     babyl-backend.
 > 
 > (3) Make rmail-frontend to use babyl-backend or mbox-backend
 >     depending on users mail file.  Rmail-frontend displays a
 >     message in a different buffer (rmail-view-buffer) than
 >     the original mail file buffer.  Rmail-frontend utilizes
 >     MIME handler to decode message headers and body.
 > 
 > This way, we can easiy add more backends, for instance,
 > IMAP, per-message files (like MH or GNUS), etc.

This is an excellent approach.  I'm kicking myself for not seeing it
when I added mbox support.  I will get to it as quickly as I can.

-pmr