11 Implementation Issues

Why are "mewl" and "mewencode" necessary?: With Mew, you can read throw messages in Summary mode while you are retrieving messages or listing the messages again. This means that multiple control flows of program are necessary. To make multiple control flows by Emacs, the only way is to make a TCP connection or to execute sub-process (Emacs Lisp does NOT provide a feature of light weight process). For POP and SMTP, Mew makes a TCP connection, so they are not a problem. However, to list the messages in Summary mode again, we have to execute a command. This is why "mewl" exists. The reason why "mewencode" exists is just for speed. When I programmed MIME encoding by Emacs Lisp in several ways, they are too slow to use. So, I decided to continue to use "mewencode". (If Base64 is implemented by Emacs, Mew uses the native function.)
Why does the cursor jump onto the end of line when searching(‘C-s’, ‘C-r’)?: Thread informations are not displayed in Summary mode. This is because the "invisible" property is dynamically put onto them when displayed. Strings with this property is not a target of the string search. But, thread informations of undisplayed lines do not have this property, so the string search targets them. Then a matched line is displayed and the "invisible" property is put. So, it seems to you that the string search matches the end of the line. Mew puts the "invisible" property for all lines in Summary mode in background while there are no user key inputs. When this word is finished, the ‘*’ mark in the right side of the mode line in Summary mode disappears. In this situation, string search works exactly as you expect.
MS’s mailers can handle file names well if I attach files with Mew 4.3: MS’s mailers use "non-standard MS original" encoding to encode file names. MS mailers should migrate to the standard encoding. I repeatedly asked MS to do so, but they did not. So, Mew took the following workaround: Mew basically uses the standard encoding. In addition, Mew add "MS original parameter" with file names encoded with "MS original" encoding.

This document was generated on February 16, 2023 using texi2html 5.0.