Bug#109171: Use Maildir format by default
According to Anthony Towns:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 12:51:05PM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> > >(it usually is not, and it definitely is not for
> > >tipical POP servers).
> > Still, deleting messages from a mbox-style mailbox means copying
> > the entire mailbox usually at least twice.
>
> Copying it once and renaming it, surely?
Depends. If you have a quota of 10 MB on /var/spool/mail, you want
the temporary copy to be somewhere else, so that means copying
back & forth between /tmp (or /var/spool/pop, which qpopper uses)
and /var/spool/mail.
Yes it's those little details that bite you in the end ..
> > >Debian should make sensible decisions about use of available technology.
> > >The reality is that maildir is only useful on some setups with remote
> > >mounted mailboxes and broken NFS locking.
> > There certainly are mailbox formats that are better than maildir,
> > but IMHO unix-style mbox files isn't one of them.
>
> There are? Any pointers?
"mbx" isn't too bad - it's like mbox but with an extra index file.
Cyrus imap uses a maildir style setup with one file per message but
also with an index file so that it doesn't need to scan every message
to get the headers or the MIME structure.
Both aren't generic (though I think that mutt, exim and pine all
support mbx natively) but it shows that better alternatives do exist.
MIke.
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