Re: procmail and Large File Support
>>>>> "Colin" == Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
Colin> Not everyone likes maildir; I gave up on it after
Colin> experimenting with it and realising that making it harder
Colin> for myself to use standard Unix text-processing tools on my
Colin> mailboxes was just too annoying. This is true of spam-bin
Colin> folders more than other folders, if anything.
Not every situation warrants using maildir, it uses a large number of
inodes, is slow to scan (yes, mbox isn't very good either),
inefficient at storing large number of very small files (due to block
size limitations of file system), and more complicated to
transfer/move/share.
Of course, all of these factors depend on the file system used. I am
confident somebody could point out a file-system that eliminates many
of these disadvantages.
The major benefits of Maildir, IIRC, seem to be:
* No locking required for mail delivery. Not all folders require this.
* More robust separation of messages (only an issue because
mbox. standards are so pathetic and everybody has there own ideas
what constitutes a reliable method to detect the end of a
message). So what appears to be to separate messages contained in
mbox format in mutt can be interpreted as only one message by
formail (see bug #295604 for example).
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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