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Re: To mbox or not, that is the question! (fwd)



On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 11:04:07AM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
| On Sunday 25 April 2004 10:46, Deboo wrote:
| >    I'm subscribed to lots of mailing lists. I use mutt for email. Now
| >    using emacs, I use mutt within emacs since I use IMAP and find it
| >    hard to use gnus (which kinda behaves like pine, being
| >    news-oriented). I archive some mailing lists and have some
| >    mailboxes, going nearly over 40MBs or more. Now loading mutt
| > within emacs and loading such a big mailbox, loads okay but makes
| > mutt slow under emacs.

mbox doen't scale well, as you can see.

| >    What is the best way to use such big mailboxes?

| >    I do not like to convert to maildirs, I'm using mbox format.

| >    Though I heard that maildir is faster,

It is faster for operations such as saving a new message, updating
flags on a message, and deleting a message.  maildir could be slower
for reading the headers of all messages because the disk heads may
need to seek more than with mbox.

| >    isn't it harder to backup or carry around?

No.  It's just a single directory, with no need for locking.

| >    Just a single mbox file is easy to carry if need be. But
| > anyway, what's the best way to use large mailbixes?

| I am just getting organised to move from kmail to mutt, and have two 
| issues to deal with.

| 1) the archive file issue you describe.

I decided it's a good idea to split large folders up into smaller ones
(ie moving list mail to a dated "archive" folder so it doesn't slow
down loading of new list mail).  My largest folders are currently in
the 20-45MB range.  Performance isn't too bad.

| 2) the 
| fact that mutt cannot cope with nested folders as produced so 
| conveniently in kmail.

Huh?  I use mutt (with maildirs) and have a nice directory hierarchy.

HTH,
-D

-- 
(A)bort, (R)etry, (T)ake down entire network?
 
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