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Re: mutt weirdness: >> "Move read messages to /home/astartoth/Mail/~/Maildir? ([n]/y):"



On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 05:26:10PM -0500, dsr@tao.merseine.nu wrote:
| On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 03:16:39PM -0500, dman wrote:
| > 
| > BTW, What's with this ~/Maildir thing I keep seeing mentioned?  Where
| > did that come from?
| 
| Maildir is an alternative method of storing mail invented by djb and
| first supportd by qmail;

Oh, that explains it (after the djbdns discussion).  He couldn't just
put the folders in ~/Mail !?

| procmail, maildrop, exim, postfix and several other packages know
| about it. Mutt supports it well; pine supports it with a patch;
| several emacs-based mailers know it. Lots of mail-related software
| can use it.
| 
| Maildir stores each message in exactly one file; it guarantees not to
| lose mail, and does not require locking, even over NFS-mounted directories.
| 
| It is fast for mail delivery and deletion; grep works for searches because
| each file is a separate message. It can be slower to load an entire folder
| than mbox because it needs to grab many files instead of just one big file.

Yeah, I use it (the storage format, that is) but I haven't seen
~/Maildir mentioned anywhere else (I guess that's a djb/qmail
incompatibility thing[1]).

-D

[1]  Ok, sure folders can be stored anywhere, but ~/Mail is a
     convention.  No need to break that *by default*.

-- 

(E)ventually (M)allocs (A)ll (C)omputer (S)torage



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