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15. Where did Mew come from?

It might not be useful but let's open the book about Mew's history...

15.1 Departure from mh-e  
15.2 Birth of Mew  
15.3 Meet to PGP  
15.4 Independence from MH  
15.5 Integration of NetNews  


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15.1 Departure from mh-e

I took part in the FJPEM research project of WIDE Project in the fall of 1993. At that time, Mine had implemented mhpem to make it convenient to use FJPEM with mh-e. Inspired by mhpem, I spend many time to enhance mhpem as escape from my master thesis in winter 1994. :)

mhpem was a lovely program to decrypt cipher messages automatically, however, we met some problems. The biggest one was that mh-e was not flexible enough to enhance some features. I really wanted to cache decrypted message to display it quickly for the second time but it was quite hard to enhance mh-e to do so. When a new version of mh-e was released and it appeared that mhpem didn't work with it, I decided to kick it out.

I want to cache decrypted PEM. Also MIME. Why isn't there a good interface to handle MIME with easy operations? Tell me the reason not to be able to cite multiple messages to one replying message. It's ridiculous that we cannot enjoy cheerful marks. I'd hate to refile messages with difficult operations. All in all, it appeared impossible for me to implement what I want by modifying mh-e.

Auto decryption in mhpem, asynchronous scan in mhasync, dynamic window setup in GNUS, cheerful mark system for multiple messages in gnus-mark, refile feature in VM, message cache mechanism, and beautiful and flexible programming style.... A pieces of puzzle was gradually getting together in my mind. It was early in the spring of 1994.


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15.2 Birth of Mew

In April 1994, I started to program Mew. Since there were references, inc and scan not to wait the exit, dynamic window configuration, marks, and message cache were implemented in early time.

To tell the truth, Mew displayed MIME messages in MIME mode. When you type `SPC' on a multipart MIME message, Mew moved from Summary mode to MIME mode. Utashiro said to me, however, "Why MIME mode? Summary mode is enough, isn't it?". It's a really breakthrough.

At this time, big problems were how to refile messages and to compose complex MIME.

It is certain that if users are always forced to write Lisp, message refile becomes easy. But I really hate to require users to setup Lisp by themselves. "It is ridiculous to try to choose default refile-folder from message header since there are thousands of candidates. Rather, it is quite reasonable to select the default from existing folder". When this idea hit my head, I could not wait for the next morning. After that, refile feature was enhanced by Nomura.

How to compose complicated MIME message with easy operations? It is a tragedy for users to be compelled to learn a composition grammar. I really wanted to provide simple yet comprehensive method to users. It was Youki that gave me the answer. Yes, MIME is file structure! We can consider that a singlepart is a file while a multipart is a directory. Users can create a file tree without any troubles, of course, and it is a Mew's job to convert the file structure to MIME format.


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15.3 Meet to PGP

I couldn't swipe out reservations to the implementation of FJPEM for a long time, then PGP finally appeared in front of me in the early summer of 1994. At that time, MIT tried to find a solution to make non-commercial PGP legal against the RSA patent, so called PGP 2.5. The release of PGP 2.6 settled down the relationship between Phil and RSADSI, yet PGP 2.6 based on RSAREF was under US export control.

Meet to 2.6ui based on 2.3a finally leaded me to be a PGP user. I cannot forget my first impression to PGP. It's a really well-designed program. In the summer of 1995, I took part in NDSS, so called ISOC Security Symposium in San Diego. In addition of the proceedings, PGP by Simson published from O'Reilly was delivered to early registered participants. It's a masterpiece of masterpieces. For these reasons, I have spent time to integrate PGP and MIME rather than to integrate PEM and MIME.

The idea that marks can represent encryption and signature was given by Mine when we wrote a paper for IPSJ together. It took a time a bit to understand its merit that marks could be canceled at any time.


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15.4 Independence from MH

"Get together in Fukuoka for good sushi!" Under these words, excellent programmers came to Momochi, Fukuoka, where Fukuoka dome locates, in April, 1997. Using Institute of Systems & Information Technologies, Kyushu as a hacking room and Hyatt Regency as sleeping rooms, MH independence project for 3 nights started.

Eating anyway, hacking as we like, and discussing comprehensively. We repeated these steps over and over. As we left Fukuoka, Mew became somehow independent on MH by using IM instead. (Engel's coefficient of this week is, of course, very high...)

Afterwords, we discussed on mailing list, tried to achieve consensus, and then hacked again and again. Finally master Utashiro casted a spell to make IM much faster then IM beta version was released in early July.


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15.5 Integration of NetNews

In the fall of 1994, I held Mew BOF(Birds Of a Feather) at WIDE camp. Mr. Sano left unforgettable words to me: "Mailing-list is some between Email and NetNews". It's like I saw a light in darkness. Now that Perl 5 become stable, the integration of NetNews is coming soon.


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