Re: mbox vs. maildir
* Chris Hilts (chilts@birdbrained.org) spake thusly:
> Are there any opinions on mbox vs. maildir? I'm told by several friends
> that maildir is probably the more efficient way to go, but my Debian system
> came with mbox by default, and I'm not sure how easy/wise it would be to
> change.
The problem with mbox is that your MUA is deleting chunks of the file
while your MTA is appending to it. Obviously, this is not a good way
of doing things. With waildir, each message is a separate file, so
that problem doesn't exist. As for efficiency, it'll probably take less
time to process one huge mbox file, then to process a directory tree
with zillion small files. So mbox may be faster.
Maildir is supposed to be safer, but if you don't run buggy MUA/MTA
with nfs-mounted /var/mail, mbox will work just fine (in fact, my
mbox is nfs-mounted and locking is *disabled*, and I haven't lost
any mail yet. Well, none that I know of, anyway.)
The other advantage of maildir is permissions on mboxes in /var/mail:
they need to be group-writable by whatever GID your MTA runs as.
Dima
--
I'm going to exit now since you don't want me to replace the printcap. If you
change your mind later, run -- magicfilter config script
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