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

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Monday 26 April 2004 23:49, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 02:16:13PM +0530, Deboo wrote:
> >    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, isn't it harder to backup or
> > carry around? Just a single mbox file is easy to carry if need be.
> > But anyway, what's the best way to use large mailbixes?
>
> Well if its a large mail box then you are more than likely going to
> need to process the mbox file using say bzip2 or gzip before moving
> it around. Using maildir just means you call tar instead (which will
> call bzip2 or gzip for you given a command line flag); so I don't
> think its any harder to use.
>
> The best way is Maildir, with a header caching patch.

Surely maildir also uses massively more disk space?  All those thousands 
of small files.  Or am I misunderstanding something?

-- 
richard