Re: To mbox or not, that is the question!
On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 12:51:06PM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
>From: Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>
>To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
>Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:51:06 +0200
>Subject: Re: To mbox or not, that is the question!
>
>On Wednesday 28 April 2004 04:36, Mike M wrote:
>>On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 06:49:59PM +0200, Richard Lyons wrote:
>[...]
>>> So it is impossible to have a hierarchy in which there are both
>>> mail and subdirectories in any directory. And if interoperability
>>> with kmail is needed, only a flat file structure will work.
>[...]
>
>>I came upon this same conclusion with experimentation and help from
>>the mutt list. I am not unhappy with it. Less magic is good.
I didn't understand this clearly How do you use mbox flat file structure
as well as a hierarchy?
>
>One last word of warning to anyone trying to operate mutt and kmail:
>while I experimented, I had both readers open concurrently. I finished
>up totally corrupting the data, so that each email in debian-user that
>I clicked on in kmail immediately lost its subject and author's name.
>This was a result of operating on mbox with both readers at once. A
>corruption near the beginning of the mbox (which was by then large)
>meant potential loss of hundreds of emails - the whole folder! I was
>able to edit the problem out by hand, but it demonstrates the relative
>security of maildir format, where each message is in its own file.
>
>--
>richard
I would like to use mutt and Sylpheed-claws sometimes. I have configured
SC to open a test mbox file but not yet used it to open the ~/Mail
directory. If someone has been using SC and mutt with mbox, do comment on
these please.
I have been reading this thread as well as reading offline docs on this
subject. When I think that the time it takes to open an mbox file is a
fuction of it's size and the time taken to open a maildir is a function
of the number of emails,
I think mbox would still be okay for me, but I could be wrong. This
kind of an mbox, which has large files with less number of messages ...
this is the culprit which would be good to have in maildir format. Ones
like this list and other mailing-lists, maybe still maildir is the way
to go for because having them as mbox, reading and deleting a lot, mbox
has to write the whole maillbox, which is it's drawback. Using maildir,
it's just one file it has to delete and not have to touch the other
files. But with my personal inbox, I'd still stay with the mbox format.
Regards,
Deboo
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