[plug] moving mail in postfix

[Daniel Pittman]

<ian at iball.id.au> writes:

> Out of curiousity, would simply appending the old mbox file to the new
> mbox file cause any issues, since the emails would not be sequential
> in the file (ie: old mail would appear after new mail)?

As others have said, no, since the MUA has to deal with out of order
emails anyhow — and if it talks to mbox it is probably competent enough
to support threading.

> There is a lot to be said for Maildir's instead of Mboxes :)

What, like that they are a dreadfully poor implementation of mh folders
that aims to address one locking related issue that is no longer hugely
relevant, and do so mostly by wishful thinking?

Alternately, we could say that they are a wonderful example of how, with
hard work, you can help to show up performance issues in filesystem code
by carefully creating a situation that was long considered pathological.

Oh, wait, how about we say that the wonderful think about standards is
that you have so many to choose from, and maildir exemplifies this with
incompatible extensions all over the place — which nesting standard do
you prefer, or perhaps quotas, or mail flags, or...

The only thing that can be said for them is that they can, by ignoring
most of the wishful thinking in the original proposal, be made more or
less lockless, and that they improve performance when deleting mail.


Beyond that you would be much better off with a well designed mailstore
that didn't impose the same performance penalties.

*grump*
       Daniel

...plus, they wouldn't even frickin help in the case you are talking
about, where you worry about out of order messages, because they
necessarily impose no order on messages.