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Re: Maildirs in Debian



On Fri, 02 Aug 2002 15:33, Germán Gutierrez wrote:
>  Jeff Waugh escribio:
> > <quote who="Donovan Baarda">
> >
> >> > There are plenty of reasons to not use Maildir, too.
> >>
> >> Aren't they mostly to do with backwards compatibility? If everything
> >> in Debian could handle it, wouldn't this be a non-issue?
> >
> > No. I use maildirs on my IMAP server and mboxes on my desktop because
> > they are appropriate to each. They operate very differently, and have
> > pros/cons for different uses.
>
> Jeff,
>      please share the cons/pros with us

Maildir performance and scalability is dependant on the filesystem. If the 
filesystem your maildirs live on store small files efficiently, and can list 
and access files in directories filled with thousands of other small files, 
no problem (ie Reiserfs), but if not (ie ext2/3), performance will tend to 
suck. 

It's a big ask to have people switch there partitions from one fs to another 
to get good mail access (especially when mbox and a client implemented index 
will mitigate the problem), but I believe there are patches for ext2/3 that 
address the 1000's of files problem that may go into 2.5, so perhaps by the 
next debian release, this won't be a problem.

I agree that hacking mail/news software of all kinds to pick there mailbox 
format based on /etc/defaults/mailbox_format would be remarkably useful.

John



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