Re: Maildir vs. mbox in Debian
On 2012-11-29 01:28:37 +0100, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> 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...
This is a problem with the file system, not with maildir. Here's
an example of file system (though not for Unix) that was partly
optimized to avoid these block size problems:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/ultimate/a252efmt.txt
(just for the pleasure of citing mail from 1990 :)
Now, I would say that in general, the wasted space is small compared
to large attachments. And if you have only text and care about disk
space, you should consider a compressed format, not "pure mbox".
> - full text search will typically be slower, as one has to open/close
> many files
This depends. I index my archive mailbox with mairix, and with mairix,
it is better to use maildir as a search result is built with symlinks
instead of copying the individual mail messages.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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