Re: UW imap c-client

[John Prevost <prevost@maya.com>]

Mark Moll <mmoll@cs.cmu.edu> writes:

> I have used both nnimap 0.95 and Pine 4.10. Although nnimap is quite usable, 
> the speed difference between nnimap and Pine is *huge*. I was wondering if
> anybody has looked at using Pine's imap back-end, c-client. I'm not a real
> xemacs wizard, but I can imagine that this c-client library can be plugged
> into xemacs 21.2 as a module. Would this be a good idea?

I'm very dubious as to the effectiveness of this.  The only win would
be on message parsing speed.  I expect c-client would be able to do a
bit better of a job than emacs at this, but in my experience, it's not
that great.

Where pine really wins is not in using c-client per se, but in using
"virtual scrollbars".  It only fetches the headers for the page you're
looking at now rather than all of the pages of header info.  Take a
look at mutt for an example of a curses-based imap reader that doesn't
do this.  Take a look at various c-client based X clients to see how
not to use c-client successfully for this purpose.

Finally, it's been my experience that c-client is more than a bit on
the ugly side.  If this imap-parsing-speaking tool were to be written,
it'd probably be better to write something from scratch that talks
IMAP on one end and elisp on the other, rather than basing on
c-client.

John.