[plug] Maildir vs mbox

[Shayne O'Neill]

Well. dunno bout the specifics of it all.

The guild machine, when its not time travelling, serves about 40 email
boxes , with some absolute monsters.

I'm currently clocking 24,000 emails in my inbox.
The pres has more. Theres a bunch like that.

The thing runs along at warp speed.

Admitedly Pine is the clear fave client in these woods.

------------------------------------
"Must not Sleep! Must warn others!"
-Aesop.
Shayne O'Neill. Indymedia. Fun.
http://www.perthimc.asn.au

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, James Devenish wrote:

> In message <406BB546.20000 at jensz.id.au>
> on Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 02:23:03PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> > I'm just curious as to what people think the cons / pros are of the two
> > mail storage formats?
>
> Needless to say, the best performers are usually those that employ some
> kind of index, and that is not part of either Maildir or mbox per se.
> For remote IMAP/POP users, I imagine Craig's recommendation of Maildir
> (or derivates) is the best advice. For direct mailbox access, though,
> mbox does have its advantages. Various marginal (but commonplace) issues
> keep me tied to mbox, but apart from that I find that my mailboxes are
> slower with Maildir under ext3. Therefore, I use Maildir for mailboxes
> that contain very large messages or benefit greatly from the removal of
> the locking requirement. However, archiving old mail is easier with
> Maildir. With a Maildir, it's trivial to have a script that shifts files
> from a current folder to an archive folder without interfering with
> anything. For mbox, the same task requires locking the mbox and parsing
> it and rewriting it, etc.
>
> In message <1080802016.13025.5.camel at bucket.localnet>
> on Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 02:46:57PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > This is why mbox is _bad_. Corruption etc also tends to trash the entire
> > mailbox, rather than one message.
>
> Interestingly, when I have encountered this, it seems to have been due
> to bugs in parsing more than anything else. However, I do recall a
> period of incidents at the Guild where certain Microsoft e-mail would
> cause the delivery system (sendmail, procmail -- or perhaps it was some
> munging performed by the POP daemon) to concatenate messages together.
> In that case, the practical solution was to tell the staff member to ask
> her friend (the sender of the e-mail) to stop forwarding jokes via
> e-mail :-)
>
> In message <1080802016.13025.5.camel at bucket.localnet>
> on Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 02:46:57PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > I've been hearing a lot about dovecot lately. Is it new, or just
> > "recently risen to prominence"?
>
> A good explanation for "risen to prominence" has already be given, but
> just for interest's sake, I note that UWA moved to dovecot for student
> IMAP last year, for reasons including speed, and I think it has stuck
> with it. /But/ they did encounter a bug. That is my nice way of
> describing the situation. (Bernard would know a lot more about
> this than me.)
>
>
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