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Re: Maildir vs. mbox in Debian



On Wed, 2012-11-28 at 14:32 +0700, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>  > # 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.

Just throwing somehing in here:
While mbox is frowned upon by many people and maildir declared as
generally superior... this is not totally true, IMHO.

Maildir has of course the following advantages to the mbox family of
formats:
- less or even no locking issues
- no obscurities of different subformats
- no need for and message separation and therefore no need for any
quoting as in mbox
- messages need not to be "modified" in a sense that the message flags
(sent, forwarded, etc.) or other meta-data (IMAP's UID, etc.) are stored
as pseudo headers
- given that each mail is a single file one has easier life with things
like backuping or integrity protection...


But it also has disadvantages to the mbox formats which may be crucial
for some people:
- wasting a lot of storage, which can be significant even if you use
small file systems block sizes...
- full text search will typically be slower, as one has to open/close
many files



Cheers,
Chris.

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