Mail::Box

Mail::Folder hasn't been maintained for many years. It can happen, but we cannot be happy about it. Next to that, there are so many different types of folders, and they develop over type. The software needs to adapt to new possibilities.

Correctness is a more serious complaint. Many e-mail applications are doing a bad job in following the specification: they produce corrupt headers, wrong part-separators, and such. Especially doing mbox folders right is a hard problem; mainly caused by the fact that also the body of a message might contain a line with /^From /, which is easy to be confused with the message separator.

Writing more fault-tolerant mail-folder scanning algorithms in Perl would be too slow: the current, simple, algorithm is just acceptable in speed. We could use the help of C, but more about that at the end of this talk.

MH- and IMAP-like folders are slow by definition, as each message is in a separate file. Reading a folder with 1000 messages means 1000 times an open of a file, a disk-seek to the data. Can you fight this?