EarthWeb: The Gmail email client

“An MUA (Mail User Agent) featuring an innovative approach to
email message storage is now under development, and it bodes well
for those email users who number their messages in the thousands.
Gmail (http://gmail.linuxpower.org/), the brainchild of Wayne
Schuller, a young Australian programmer, uses the MySQL database
server, and retrieves, sorts and displays messages via SQL, the
well known “Structured Query Language.” It became possible to
develop Gmail as an Open Source project when, earlier this year,
MySQL changed its licensing to the GNU GPL. Schuller is a advocate:
“I’m a big supporter of the GNU project and the importance of GPL
licensing; that pushed me in the [direction of] Gnome two years
ago.” (He also reminded this reviewer that Gmail is not the only
MUA using a SQL database; Pronto (http://www.muhri.net/pronto/),
written in Perl, is very much a going concern.)”

“It isn’t hard to accumulate thousands of email messages. If one
makes some careful choices among the myriad mailing lists that
abound across the Internet, messages by the hundreds will pour in
daily, and add up to thousands as the days go by. Given that hard
drive space has become quite inexpensive, anyone can now create
their own archives of lists that are of interest to them. If you’ve
ever struggled with those online “searchable” archives of email
lists, accessed with a web browser, then you can appreciate how
such personal archives can have a use, sometimes a life-saving use,
if the solution to a quandry can be quickly found because those
archives were created and maintained.”

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