Re: maildir vs. mbox vs. mh ???
Jeff wrote:
>
> Michael D. Schleif, 2003-Feb-09 15:05 -0600:
> >
> > Considering moving from mbox to maildir a very large (~2GB, ~1000000
> > messages) email archive. Mostly concerned with the integrity of
> > receiving messages intact.
> >
> > Obviously, this will impact performance and inodes used.
> >
> > Given this brief overview, what ought I to consider?
> >
> > Are there other options to consider?
> >
> > How else might I handle this data?
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> I've not used mh mail boxes before, only maildir and mbox. I use
> maildir for my active mailboxes for it's ability to keep messages from
> getting messed up on delivery (sorry for the non-tech reason). For
> mail boxes that I use for archive and are non-active, I use mbox for
> it's ease in backing up.
This is interesting -- is it possible to use two (2) mailbox formats at
once?
Can mutt be used to review incoming mail under maildir, and also to
browse my archived mail under mbox? How?
> Performance-wise, I don't think you'll notice a difference in loading
> the mail box on a modern machine. On older, slower machines, you
> might see the mbox loading faster than the maildir folders.
>
> If I had an archive mail box that size, I'd leave it as an mbox so I
> can back it up easier since it's a single file as opposed to a
> directory.
My biggest concern is number of inodes.
My goal is to have fetchmail go out and grab mail and news from multiple
servers, procmail to sort and process it, mutt to read it and possibly
one of the webmail variants to access it while away from the office.
This is all very clean when the overall universe of mail/news, including
old archives, is small; but, such is not this case.
I am open to all suggestions . . .
--
Best Regards,
mds
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888.250.3987
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