Re: kmail corrupts emails
On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 08:51:23PM +0200, Theo Schmidt wrote:
> Do these problems also apply to Thunderbird, do you think, Nick? I have
> just switched to this even though I prefer kmail to Thunderbird, because
> I don't trust kmail any more for the mbox format and am not yet ready to
> switch to maildir (using ext3 and not reiserfs). (I hope asking this
> question isn't heresy on this list.)
I don't find the choice of filesystem makes a major difference to personal
mail, if you're not running a big mail hub :-) Reiser would be better if
you're running maildirs with more than, say, a thousand messages (finger
in the air figure :-)) but I found that Mutt is a couple of seconds
slower to open a large mailbox when it's 3000 files rather than one.
I user Reiser here because it's good at recovering from crashes, there's
no lost+found on a Reiser filesystem cos files don't get lost!
I prefer maildir though as it's much quicker for Mutt to write the 'read'
status and any other changes you make, such as re-threading or deleting
large attachments. Kmail is also good for this as you can filter stuff
to your heart's content, into loads of not-so-large maildirs.
It's not hard for a programmer to lock a mailbox against conflicting
changes even if it is all one mbox, anyway. Mutt manages its mail by
modifying private headers and I think trad Unix mail tools do the same.
I think Netscape Mail as well, and hence presumably Thunderbird does.
Pine keeps its status in a special first mail, which can confuse people
when they read it with anything else.
I think kmail's a pretty good mailer, but it lacks a way to interwork
when I want to mail from the command line. I tend to leave kmail running
on the main mailbox so that filters can redirect stuff. Mutt, at least,
also can't (AFAIK) read kmail's maildir++++ format, indexes or no !
I only wonder if there's an issue with mailboxes on remote servers.
If you can only RETR or DELE a mail, you kind of need an outside index :-)
Nick
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