Re: kmail corrupts emails [solved]
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Am Montag, 26. September 2005 21:23 schrieb Randy Kramer:
> I suppose maildir will be OK (and maybe even better) for my inbox, which I
> generally keep "trimmed" (not too many emails).
Maildir is the recommended format. It's even the default for a new kmail
installation.
> I don't think I want to do that for my mail folders which often have a lot
> (thousands) of archived emails (usually short).
So what? Our department's mail server uses maildir, and there are far more
than only thousands of messages.
On the other hand, for lots of messages, the mbox file needs to be searched /
loaded in whole, while in maildir only one file needs to be loaded.
> Is it the general consensus that mbox is more subject to corruption than
> maildir?
In mbox, all messages are just concatenated together, so if there is even only
one broken byte (e.g. a null byte), it might possibly mess up all messages
that come afterwards. In maildir, each message is one file, so at most this
one message can be corrupted.
> I use a text record separator to separate records (currently "\n---++ ").
> My largest file at the moment is about 3000 records with 3 M characters. I
> haven't seen the need to create an index yet, but that may be coming.
>
> I guess if I get some corruption without the index, I'll eventually notice
> it in some record that I look at it, and may be able to fix it, as
> everything is visible plain text, at least when viewed in a (plain) text
> editor.
Sure, but if you have a broken sector or something, some sequence might be
filled with random data, and while you might be able to manually spot this
and guess whether it's between two mails (i.e. a mail end/begin corrupted) or
halfway through a message, it's impossible for a computer.
This means that the index (some message states need to be stored in a separate
file, since mbox doesn't store them) of all later messages might possibly be
off by one... In particular, for all messages after that you can't be really
sure if that message is deleted or the one after it.
KMail uses the offset into the file in the index file, so this problem can be
worked around, but compacting will possibly remove too many / too less
messages.
Reinhold
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Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna, Austria
email: reinhold@kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
* Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at
* K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org/, KOrganizer maintainer
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