[I know this thread is old.] On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 08:31:58AM -0700, Aaron Lehmann wrote: > I'm interested in performance differences. A big flaw of the mbox > format is that every byte of the file must be read to extract headers > of the messages .. i.e. display a list of the messages without > necessarily showing any data. Does maildir employ a summarization > technique or must an MUA open every single file to extract the mailbox > headers?
No. Also note that mbox format need not be lossy -- MDA should quote with > any line matching regexp "^>*From ", MUA should always remove one level of quoting at display time. Any software not following this is losing information (and therefore buggy). Also, for reference: ______________________________________________________________________ Date: 8 Jan 1997 01:15:39 -0000 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: wishlist -- shared Maildir/ > Therefore, why not expand the Maildir definition to support the issues that > an MUA has as well? It's already adequate for most MUAs, with info serving the same role for maildir as Status serves for mbox. (Yes, agreement between MUAs on the info format would be nice. Yes, I will coordinate.) It's not adequate for MH-style sequences. Handling sequences reliably over NFS is exceedingly difficult; I certainly wouldn't want to try. As a practical matter, I don't see one-file-per-message as a good format for long-term message archiving. It's bitten by all of the filesystem's traditional performance problems. If I were writing an MUA, I'd want an archive format designed for low space, very fast lookup, and fast append: e.g., each message gzipped individually, concatenated into a single file, with a separate random-access index listing positions and sizes. ---Dan ______________________________________________________________________ I think the koobera.math.uic.edu address is still good, but his cannonical address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Raul
