Re: Maildir vs. mailbox
On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 12:49:03PM +0200, Tom?s N??ez Lirola wrote:
> Hi
> I'm the one who was talking about migrating the servers to a Compaq Proliant
> DL360G3.
> First of all I want to thank you all for your support. 15 replys in >24 hours.
> Thank you very much (I was quite worried about that).
>
> Now, as the migration is imminent, I thought that I can take profit and build
> the servers from zero, and install them the ideal way (that is probably not
> using sendmail, probably not using bind, probably using apache2...).
>
> Looking docs, I've decided to move mail server from sendmail+qpop to
> postfix+courier. And now I wonder if I should move to maildir format or stay
> mbox format. I've found a lot of scripts to convert (mb2md-2 looks pretty
> well), but I've not found any site explaining why should I move to maildir.
>
> I suppose it's easier to open a mail in a maildir than do the same on a mbox
> (If the mbox is <20MB, qpop takes 80% of CPU for a while fetching it), but I
> do not know advantages/inconvenients.
The main advantage of maildir is the fact that maildir doesn't use a
locking mechanism.
The MUA can read and delete messages while mail is being delivered by the
MTA. The MTA delivers messages to maildir/tmp. When finished, it moves the
messages to maildir/new. The MUA picks up the new mail from maildir/new,
and moves them to maildir/cur when marked as read.
When mailboxes get large, maildir has the advantage of one-mail-per-file
over one big file with a lot of mails stuffed into it. This makes mailbox
indexing faster.
Maildir is also useful when using multiple MTA's delivering to a single
mailbox over, for instance, NFS. When using multiple MTA's to deliver to a
single mbox file, things can get messy.
Cheers,
Bart
--
Bart Matthaei bart@dreamflow.nl
There's no sex in struct sockaddr_in ..
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