Re: the right bug severity in case of data corruption
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:56:25AM +0000, Jon Dowland wrote:
> For anyone else following along at home who is slightly puzzled by all this,
> <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html>
> explains the different mbox formats, what 'From_' means, etc.
Quoting from that page:
# With the advent and now widespread adoption of the superior Maildir format
# over the past several years, the entire "mbox" family of mailbox formats
# is gradually becoming irrelevant, and of only historical interest.
which is no news. And you can't really run a mail server in mbox if you
ever receive mail from business users: for them, sending the text as an
image wrapped in a Word document is the rule rather than an exception[1].
With mbox, every access requires linearly scanning the whole file. Users
tend to keep loads of junk so you can expect multi-GB[2] mboxes.
There are two typical cases for mta installations:
* a real mail server: you need to be able to handle large mails
* no mail other than cron/etc: storage type is irrelevant
So, what's the reason mbox is still the default in Debian?
Among other gains, data loss because of mboxo would be gone.
[1]. Bonus points for printing out your plain text piece of mail,
highlighting something with a marker, adding comments in pen, scanning it
back and then mailing.
[2]. Let's take a look at one of my users' ~/Maildir. I whine about too
much junk from time to time[3], asking to delete at least pointless
attachments, so the two biggest dirs are "only" 2.8GB and 2.3GB, both
around 6.5k pieces, the largest of which is 48MB.
[3]. Out of a habit, I guess. With current disk sizes, no one should care
about a few gigs here, a few gigs there. Unless you need to read a mbox
linearly, that is.
--
How to squander your resources: those silly Swedes have a sauce named
"hovmästarsås", the best thing ever to put on cheese, yet they waste it
solely on mere salmon.
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