Re: maildir vs. mbox vs. mh ???
On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 23:46:26 -0800,
Vineet Kumar wrote:
>
> * Cameron Matheson (cmatheson3@hotpop.com) [030209 22:25]:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 08:00:52PM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > > Well, you can tar and compress a maildir, and then it only
> > > takes 1, same as an mbox. That works fine for archiving,
> > > though is not as convenient for active mailboxes. I also
> > > don't really buy that a maildir is difficult to back up
> > > (especially if you tar.(gz|bz2) it). I like using maildirs
> > > mostly because mbox feels like a dirty hack, with the whole
> > > "From " thing. I also like the increased scriptability
> > > using standard GNU tools like grep to find and process
> > > individual messages, instead of having to use some sort of
> > > mbox-parsing perl module.
> >
> > What do you mean by the "From "-thing? I have always just
> > used mbox because that is what fetchmail puts my mail into
> > but this thread has aroused my interest in maildir... Can i
> > use maildir w/ fetchmail/exim? If not, how does one get
> > maildir, and what are the technical advantages?
>
> An mbox file is a file with all the messages laid out in it
> end-to-end, separated by lines beginning with "From ". Any
> lines in the body of a message that begin with "From " are then
> munged into ">From " by the program delivering into the mbox.
> That's just a dirty, dirty hack. Add to that that the file
> needs to be locked properly(and that file locking on NFS is not
> perfect) in order to prevent it from getting corrupted (and
> that corrupting the file means corrupting a whole mailbox, not
> a single message) and you have a technologically inferior mail
> storage design, IMHO. On the other hand, it's the original way
> of doing things, so support for it is universal. Also, loading
> an mbox is generally faster than loading a maildir.
There are ways of cheating, like having an index.
> Exim will happily deliver into maildirs if you uncomment the
> "maildir_format" line in the address_directory transport (and
> somehow specify the directory you'd like to deliver to, perhaps
> via .forward or by making a director that checks if ~/Maildir/
> or ~/Inbox/ exists and delivering there if so). I don't know
> about fetchmail, but if you have it configured to deliver via
> SMTP through the local exim anyway, it shouldn't be an issue.
> I do know that procmail and maildrop both support delivery into
> maildirs.
The procmail (or maildrop) solution is IMHO better than having
one program to rule them all. One program to fetch(mail), another
to deliver (exim), and another to filter (procmail).
> As for MUA support, I know mutt does, but I'm not 100% sure of
> others. It's fairly widely supported at this point, and I'd
> guess that the popular X GUI mailers (sylpheed, kmail,
> evolution) do support it as well. I see that you're using
> mutt, though, so you'll be fine.
Unless some new feature was added to CVS, Sylpheed(-claws)
supports MH, which isn't quite maildir. KMail supports maildir in
addition to what I believe is its version of mbox. I haven't
tried Evolution in ages. My User-Agent of choice, Wanderlust (an
elisp program running under Emacs) supports all three, mbox, MH
and maildir.
MH uses raw numerals to name each separate message; maildir uses
something fancier. I like MH because to delete mail I can forego
the fussiness of the MUA and just "cd" to the MH folder, type,
say, "rm 12??" and thereby remove messages 1200 to 1299 all in
one go.
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