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

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@compsoc.dur.ac.uk>]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 01:34:16PM +0100,  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 09:53:05AM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
> 
> > Surely maildir also uses massively more disk space?  All those thousands 
> > of small files.  Or am I misunderstanding something?
> 
> Maildir does use considerably more space. However, from rough
> experimentation and experience, compressed Maildirs are within a few
> kilobytes of the size of the same mails in a compressed mbox.

The above was based on manipulating mail collections in the order of a
few hundred kilobytes.

Here are the results of a quick experiment with a moderately large body 
of mail:

$ du -sh Mail/debian-user
50M     Mail/debian-user
$ ls -lh Mail/temp-deb
-rw-------    1 jmtd     users         37M Apr 27 13:36 Mail/temp-deb
$ gzip Mail/temp-deb
$ tar -czf /tmp/mdir.tar.gz Mail/debian-user/; ls -lh /tmp/mdir.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 jmtd     users        9.8M Apr 27 13:38 /tmp/mdir.tar.gz
$ ls -lh Mail/temp-deb.gz 
-rw-------    1 jmtd     users        7.0M Apr 27 13:36 Mail/temp-deb.gz

Where `Mail/debian-user' is a Maildir, and `temp-deb' is an mbox; both
with the same contents.

-- 
Jon Dowland
http://jon.dowland.name/