On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 12:49:03PM +0200, Tom?s N??ez Lirola wrote: > Hi > I'm the one who was talking about migrating the servers to a Compaq Proliant > DL360G3. > First of all I want to thank you all for your support. 15 replys in >24 > hours. > Thank you very much (I was quite worried about that). > > Now, as the migration is imminent, I thought that I can take profit and build > the servers from zero, and install them the ideal way (that is probably not > using sendmail, probably not using bind, probably using apache2...). > > Looking docs, I've decided to move mail server from sendmail+qpop to > postfix+courier. And now I wonder if I should move to maildir format or stay > mbox format. I've found a lot of scripts to convert (mb2md-2 looks pretty > well), but I've not found any site explaining why should I move to maildir. > > I suppose it's easier to open a mail in a maildir than do the same on a mbox > (If the mbox is <20MB, qpop takes 80% of CPU for a while fetching it), but I > do not know advantages/inconvenients.
The main advantage of maildir is the fact that maildir doesn't use a locking mechanism. The MUA can read and delete messages while mail is being delivered by the MTA. The MTA delivers messages to maildir/tmp. When finished, it moves the messages to maildir/new. The MUA picks up the new mail from maildir/new, and moves them to maildir/cur when marked as read. When mailboxes get large, maildir has the advantage of one-mail-per-file over one big file with a lot of mails stuffed into it. This makes mailbox indexing faster. Maildir is also useful when using multiple MTA's delivering to a single mailbox over, for instance, NFS. When using multiple MTA's to deliver to a single mbox file, things can get messy. Cheers, Bart -- Bart Matthaei [EMAIL PROTECTED] There's no sex in struct sockaddr_in ..
