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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: [Bug 89100] archive feature like gmail
From:       "Michael S. Mikowski" <z_mikowski () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2004-09-09 15:30:03
Message-ID: 200409091130.03893.z_mikowski () yahoo ! com
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On Thursday 09 September 2004 07:24 am, Rishi wrote:
> ------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
> You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89100
> ------- Additional Comments From rishigangoly gmail com  2004-09-09 13:24
> ------- No I do not know how it is done on Gmail. However, would you guys
> like a Gmail Invite? I have 6 new Gmail invites. If you can hack around and
> figure out how to do it, it would be great. Also I've heard of
> something called the GmailFS (Gmail File System) not sure if you can
> see what this is all about and if it answers the question on weather
> or not messages are compressed or not.
> I suspect that it's probably not compressed because the search feature
> is blazingly fast. I guess their indexing is also pretty good.
> Searching for a mail in Gmail and Kmail is huge. I guess this has to
> do with the server clustering and thus Kmail is limited because of it?

This may have relevance to the whole "make KMail more like GMail" discussion.  
These GMail features sound good, but my thought is "be careful what you wish 
for."   While GMail's approach to unstructured data is useful in a single 
user environment, moving this concept to shared data may be intrinsically 
flawed.  And that could prove troublesome as KMail continues to incorporate 
groupware capabilities.  Here's why:

I worked with a GMail - like concept in the late 90's, but we required 
multiple users to share the data.  One fact became apparent rather quickly: 
the users must provide at least one attribute to each and every item -- 
something to indicate who has authority to access and how.  We eventually 
implemented an ACL's based hierarchical folder system delineated by 
authority.  Thus authority could be granted implicitly (e.g. "This item will 
remain in my inbox, where I know no else can access it") or explicitly (e.g. 
"I'm going to move this into Accounts Receivable for the employees there to 
see").

Of course, some other method might be employed to indicate authority, however, 
the folders concept seemed the fastest way for users to grasp and apply the 
concept of authority to items.  This was because users were already familiar 
with the folder concept throughout their computing experience, and many 
folders are used as a means to enforce authority (the other major use, of 
course, is data organization).

The resulting hybrid system now provides the advantages of an rdbm 'flat' 
datastructure (e.g. random, fast searches against multiple attributes) with 
optimization based on hierarchy (e.g, "search only in Accounting," "Show 
search results of all items accessible by the Manager of Operations").

-- 
Michael S. Mikowski, RHCE (RHEL 3)
http://mindsharemanagement.com
sales@mindsharemanagement.com

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