mail box format (was Re: Unidentified subject!)
Ilya L Ovchinnikov <ilya@psn.ru> wrote:
> What do you think about switching from Mbox to Maildir in Debian?
This should be a system administrator decision.
> Maildir is Qmail's format of mailboxes which is far more reliable
> than traditional mbox and need not any locking. It is supported
> by mutt,
Mutt's support for maildir is still immature -- mutt has performance
problems because it doesn't fully incorporate new mail as it's detected
and because mutt doesn't record some state information when it does
incorporate the new mail.
> and patch for procmail exists, so it can be used even without Qmail
> (which is very good thing, I can't live without it, but its licence
> does not permit distribution of modified binaries :( ) If we switch,
> we would not need setgid-mail MUAs and would not have corrupted
> mailboxes when system-without-UPS-is-crashed-during-mail-delivery
I think this sort of move will eventually be a good idea, but at
the moment it eliminates too many choices.
> Maybe freeze time is not good time for such suggestions,
> but anyway unstable exists...
Is there an imap4 server that supports maildir yet? Does mailx (or any
of a variety of other significant mail handling software) support maildir?
I don't think we're ready for this kind of change, yet.
[Also note that the mh has many of the same benefits -- it needs
locking, but is very robust about mail message boundaries.]
--
Raul
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