Re: mbox vs. maildir
On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 01:43:41PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
| Chris Hilts wrote:
|
| > Are there any opinions on mbox vs. maildir? I'm told by several friends
| > that maildir is probably the more efficient way to go, but my Debian system
| > came with mbox by default, and I'm not sure how easy/wise it would be to
| > change.
|
| It depends what you mean by "efficient". Mbox is certainly more
| efficient in terms of disk space (except perhaps on Reiserfs, which
| handles large quantities of small files better than ext2), but maildir
| is faster in some ways (particularly if more than one process may want
| to access the folder at the same time).
One difference :
mbox takes linear time to update it (ie if you delete one message)
maildir takes constant time
What this means is that as your mailbox (say for deb-user) grows large
(200+ or 300+ messages) it will take a longer time to delete just a
single message than if you have a small mailbox (with mbox format).
WIth maildir it doesn't matter what size your mailbox is.
I'm using maildir now and I am happy with it. (Oh, yeah, maildir is
also useful for locating a message -- you can grep all the files in
the directory and see which one is the one you were looking for)
-D
--
A perverse man stirs up dissension,
and a gossip separates close friends.
Proverbs 16:28
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