Re: To mbox or not, that is the question!
On 2004-04-29, Deboo penned:
[snip]
>
> 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.
I'm still using mbox, and I am not having speed issues worth changing
for -- sure, if I don't purge my sent-mail box every now and then, it
takes a couple of seconds to view, but I can live with that. I really
think it depends on how you typically use your mail. If you let the
mailboxes you most commonly use fill up with thousands of messages, I
think that reading your mail will be painful, no matter what format you
use.
You should be aware, though, that when an mbox file corrupts, it
corrupts absolutely -- you won't be able to read any of the messages in
the file using a mail reader. In contrast, if a maildir message gets
corrupted, you only lose that one message. In practice, I've never had
such corruption, and I suspect that in most cases a knowledgeable person
could fix the corruption ... but anyway, we're all keeping backups,
right? =)
(For my mail, the first thing procmail does after dropping swen messages
is to make a copy to a backup mailbox. Then procmail and tmda do all of
their processing. That way, if I write a really stupid rule that
deletes all of my mail, I still have it somewhere. The backup mailbox
is managed using logrotate so that it doesn't get too huge ... and I
suspect that doing the logrotate thing using maildir would be
non-trivial, although I'm sure someone will prove me wrong.)
--
monique
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