[plug] Maildir vs mbox

[Ben Jensz]

Craig Ringer wrote:

>
>If the choice is maildir vs mbox, I'd pick maildir every time.
>
>Given a full choice, I'd use Cyrus IMAPd (which uses a very maildir-like
>backend format) instead.
>
>  
>
I didn't like Cyrus last time I looked, so didn't really pursue it much 
at all.

>The MTA does direct delivery? I thought most "serious" mail systems took
>message delivery over LMTP rather than letting the MTA do the delivery
>directly into the mail spools.
>
>
>  
>
Okay, you've just gone over my head a little bit.  Reasons why it 
should/shouldn't?

>I've been hearing a lot about dovecot lately. Is it new, or just
>"recently risen to prominence"? Does it have any particularly notable
>features that might interest me in it? I've found Cyrus IMAPd a little
>tricky to get going, but absolutely wonderful from that point on.
>
>  
>
Comes with Fedora.. general comments about it seem to be that its secure.

>This is why mbox is _bad_. Corruption etc also tends to trash the entire
>mailbox, rather than one message.
>
>  
>
I had heard of people having corruption issues with mbox, but had really 
put it off as a non-issue in my mind as in the 4 and a half years since 
we've had a Linux based mail server (it was NT4 / Exchange when I 
started here), we haven't had any corruption issues at all.

>Indeed. You need a filesystem that's good with many small files,
>however. I've had great results with ReiserFS. Converting my mail spools
>from ext3 to reiserfs actually gave me a speedup of somewhere between 2x
>and 10x depending on the mailbox and operation.
>
>  
>
I was intending on using ext3 (and the machine is already setup on 
ext3)... any potential issues with Maildirs?

Thanks.


/ Ben