Ookhoi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Sun, 07 May 2000:
> Aren't you running out of inodes, and wasting disk space with Maildir? I
> receive about 1400 messages a day, and I think I would run out of
> inodes, or at least waste a _lot_ of disk space.
I get anything from 1500 to over 2000 emails weekly, so not quite as
much as you, but still. It all goes into Maildirs, some I don't check
that often. I'm not worried about disk usage, disk space is very cheap
nowadays and anyway, emails takes a *very* little space. Even if you
use Maildir which does waste a little space compared to mbox. I got a
big /home partition on purpose so that I wouldn't need to worry about
how much space "little things" like email takes.
But then again, it has been said before, Maildir is not really suited
(or at least, not designed) as an email *archive* format. It's more or
less ideal for incoming mail.
> > Migrating messages to different folders by date, hooking a search
> > engine up, doing broad analyses, looking for historical data by
> > sender, subject, keyword, whatever; I find these all very pleasing
> > to do with a one-message-per-file format.
>
> Some of the things you metion can also be done with mbox format I think?
Yes of course, but it's a lot more work than with Maildir's single file
per message storage method. You need to write custom tools whereas with
Maildir you can easily adapt many standard unix tools for the required
tasks.
(I'm answering even though I'm not the person who originally wrote that
text...)
Another advantage with Maildir which hasn't been mentioned yet is that
it's not subject to the flakyness of new mail state that mbox suffers
from. :-)
Mikko
--
// Mikko H�nninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
"I have this nagging fear that everyone is out to make me paranoid."
