Kevin sent a list of items that have been requested most often. Some of
this we have a start on, much we do not...
General stuff:
- Year 2000 compliance
- MIME support and all it implies
- The ability to create/configure message and index templates
With variables:
# of messages (by author, in thread)
date, first name, last name, email, etc.
sorting preferences - forward vs. reverse
- The ability to split up indices into pages
Limit by # of messages and by hour/day/week/month
Make subfolders?
- No fixed string limits
- No fixed message limits
- Support for META tags
Make sure HTML, HEAD, BODY, H1... tags are in the right place
- Should recognize and parse indented HTML tags
- Don't ignore umask -
HM_UMASK variable? instead of chmoding everything to 0777
- Fix the settings order:
- Internal defaults
- Environment vars
- Resource files
- Config file
- Database file
- Command-line
- Ability to save files with suffix ".htm" or ".html"
- A better icon for hypermail!
Archiving/storage stuff:
- Support for a flat file database that stores pointers to articles
- Ability to refer to articles via message ID as well
- The ability to delete a message
- Expire old articles, honor "X-Expires" or "Expires"
- The ability to cap the archive to X most recent messages
- Warning to users: *Always* keep original mail archive!
But provide a way to retrieve the original RFC822 message?
Parsing stuff:
- Warning to users: Only unix mbox style archive format!
Allow for multiple formats to be recognized
Like news articles
- Use Content-Length to check email lengths
- Ability to check for duplicate emails and message IDs
- The date parser needs to be more robust - use regex for doing this?
Check for dates not containing ":"
Check for date values that are not padded with a "0" on the left
Here are some date formats used in mail:
Mon Feb 13 00:31:54 PST 1995
13 Feb 95 00:31:54 PST
Fri, 11 Aug 95 13:45:21 BST
Fri Aug 11 13:45:21 1995
Wed, 1 Sep 1994
24 Aug 94 09:48:00
From jj_at_scorpio.tn.cornell.edu Wed Jul 24 13:21 EDT 1996
Wed, 7 Dec 94 7:42:00 CST
From joe_at_MIT.EDU Mon Aug 29 15:00:20 CST 1994
From af-bounce_at_atmforum.com Thu Sep 22 06:40 EST 1994
From triley_at_VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU Tue Nov 1 09:11:45 +0000 1994
Tue, 1 Nov 1994 09:11:45 +0000
From lange_at_chi.acc.bessy.de Fri Dec 9 17:09 MEZ 1994
- Date sorting needs to be more robust
Allow for very old years
Allow for years > current year
Timezone conversion
- "From" field parsing should be more robust
Ignore duplicate "From:", only look for "From "?
Here are some sample fields:
From: kevinh (no _at_)
From: <user_at_node.domain> (no text name, use email as text name)
From: "(Joe Bloggs)" <joe_at_anorg.com>
From: fred_at_foo.com
From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul>
- In parsing header fields, check for extra spaces, tabs, etc.
Wrap and concatentate lines as per RFC822
- Check for zero-length headers
- Check "Re:" and redundant "Re:"s; "re:", "re", "RE:", "RE", etc.
Also "(was...)", "was ", "was..."
- Search for "HTTP" and "http" when making links
- Parse archives with only one or zero messages
- Quoting:
" Jane>"
" >"
"]"
")"
":"
" : "
Threading stuff:
Make sure "sort by..." groups all messages in same thread
Sort by "in reply to" as well
Other Things to do:
- Correctly grep RFC 822 headers, fold lines, and collapse white space
- Use the Content-length: header to help figure out forwarded messages
- Display HTML when the "Content-type: text/html" shows up
(allow for MIME HTML stuff, boundaries)
- Make the parser better - make it handle more than one instance per line
- Add date/subject/author filters for articles that are read in
- Some easy way to customize a print function for each *message* in addition
to the existing method for customizing the thread, date, subject, and author
pages. In otherwords, being able to add a print_header() and print_footer()
function for each message-page.
- It would be great to include a runtime option that creates a "mailto:"
link to the mailing list address for each message-page (I keep getting
messages from several different archive users requesting info on how to
post to the list);
- All "mailto:" links include the "subject" so that the Subject: line of
netscape mailer is automatically filled in.
- Add locking to the archive so there is no race conditions and only a
single message is processed at a time. Subsequent arriving messages
would queue waiting completion...
- Do away with one-file-per-message - I have lists with dozens of messages
per day and it would just be nicer to pluck a single message out of a file
and format it into HTML on the fly. All it would take is the maintenance
of a companion file which listed starting byte positions for each message,
and optionally some extra info for each message to speed up message threading
and menus, etc.
--
Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502
Email: kent_at_landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/
Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent_at_landfield.com
Search the Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/
Received on Thu 23 Apr 1998 05:42:46 AM GMT