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Before we continue with the tour of CVS Hep, a reminder: New features are being added, and bugs are being fixed, all the time. Frequent use of ‘cvs update’ for both the hep and messaging modules is recommended.

One of the most powerful new features in the CVS version of Hep is message archiving. It’s typical for RSS aggregators to only let you see the messages that are currently in the RSS feed. But this doesn’t help you if you’re looking to read an old message that’s dropped off the bottom of the list.

Hep solves this problem by archiving old messages for each connection, even when they’re no longer available from the source. These messages are marked internally as ‘deleted’, but they’re still visible through the web interface. You can identify these messages because they’ll show up with a grey background, like this:

Of course, keeping all these messages around wouldn’t do much good if you weren’t able to search them. So Hep keeps a searchable index of all messages (powered by Lupy). You can search your messages through the web interface:

Along with indexing the title and body of messages, Hep tracks metadata, such as whether messages have been read or deleted. This makes it possible to create “views”, virtual folders that display messages from all your connections that meet certain criteria. Currently the only view available in Hep is “New Messages”, but more will come in the future, along with the ability to make your own views.

The “New Messages” view is also used by Hep’s POP3 server, to let you download unread messages into your e-mail client. More on that tomorrow.