Re: Mailbox types: MBOX or MH

[David Coe <david@someotherplace.org>]

Bryan Scaringe <Bryan.Scaringe@computer.org> writes:

> I'd like to create a new mailbox folder.  My MUA, XFmail,
> supports both MH and MBOX style mailboxes.  Which is
> better?  Or rather, what are the pros and cons of each?
> I would like to start using Mohogany, once its a little
> more stable.  Will my choice of mailbox type make any
> difference to that transition?

Here's what the gnus doc has to say about those two; I
don't know XFmail, but I assume most of this applies:

------
`nnmbox'
     UNIX systems have historically had a single, very common, and well-
     defined format.  All messages arrive in a single "spool file", and
     they are delineated by a line whose regular expression matches
     `^From_'.  (My notational use of `_' is to indicate a space, to
     make it clear in this instance that this is not the RFC-specified
     `From:' header.)  Because Emacs and therefore Gnus emanate
     historically from the Unix environment, it is simplest if one does
     not mess a great deal with the original mailbox format, so if one
     chooses this backend, Gnus' primary activity in getting mail from
     the real spool area to Gnus' preferred directory is simply to copy
     it, with no (appreciable) format change in the process.  It is the
     "dumbest" way to move mail into availability in the Gnus
     environment.  This makes it fast to move into place, but slow to
     parse, when Gnus has to look at what's where.

`nnmh'
     The Rand MH mail-reading system has been around UNIX systems for a
     very long time; it operates by splitting one's spool file of
     messages into individual files, but with little or no indexing
     support - `nnmh' is considered to be semantically equivalent to
     "`nnml' without active file or overviews".  This is arguably the
     worst choice, because one gets the slowness of individual file
     creation married to the slowness of access parsing when learning
     what's new in one's groups.
------

So if those are the only two choices, I guess mbox is likely to 
be better if you don't need MH for somehting else.

HTH