Quoting Nadav Har'El, from the post of Sun, 06 Apr: > > Think also of delivery of mail to such a mailbox: delivering a mail to a > > maildir is certainly much faster. So is delition. > > For deletion your point is obviously true, but I don't think it's true for > delivery: delivery in an old-style mailbox file involves simply appending > a message to the end of the message - there is no need to search the big > mailbox for anything while doing it.
other than seeking to the very end of it, locking it, checking for previous locks, checking for stale status of said locks, etc. etc. think of maildir as a hash and mbox as a linked list. it's even worse since you don't know how large each message is when you traverse the mbox so you need to read each and every byte into memory, think about cache thrashing and trashing with modern mailboxes full of large attachments. the problems with maildirs are two: the files are tiny and waste too much allocation space, and the directories are usually not tree-indexed so you have a hash but the keys are again in a linked list rather than a tree. Reiser (AFAIK) is the only FS that solves both of these problems, and is therefore the best FS for Maildirs. the practical problems with the UI to Maildirs is that they appear as directories and you don't know if they are a dir or a maildir until you go in. this, IMHO should have been tested and obscured by the MUA but mutt won't do it sadly, hence the annoying navigation when you don't want to key in the filename. However with the latest extensions for maildir trees which were agreed upon by Cyrus, Twisted matrix and other Maildir-compatible apps, it's the best format (again, IMHO) for IMAP and pop3 servers. if the navigation in mutt gives you a headache, consider using IMAP as mutt's backend to improve law and order, but be aware you are paying with the ability to search faster through mailboxes. and a word about "indexed mailboxes", Mozilla doesn't change a thing in the mbox format, it just adds a persistant index file that saves the time of indexing an mbox in RAM each time you open it. If you dump the index you should still be able to read it in mutt for instance. some past versions of Netscape knew how to reindex standalone mbox files when forced to adopt one, I have no idea if that option still exists. -- The Count of Montי Christo Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
