* On 2002.06.08, in <20020608212345.GB4832@sumida>, * "Kevin Coyner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I don't want to start a religious war, but is there consensus opinion > as to whether mbox or Maildir is better? I know mutt supports both > automatically, so it's probably a bit of a mute question, but mutt > also gives you the option of specifying which format new folders are > set up in, so I thought I'd ask.
There's no consensus, and there's no right answer. It depends on your needs and perhaps on some characteristics of your OS. I think most people have agreed that mbox is probably best for large archival material, where new messages are not appended. At some variable point, mbox can theoretically perform much better than maildir or mh folders, because of the decreased number of directory hits. But it also requires more reads, which means more data processing, so where this point lies along the spectrum depends on the ratio of your filesystem performance to your read rate and your CPU and memory speeds. But in any case, a common observation with maildirs is that it becomes noticeably slower when you stretch into many thousands of messages. Maildirs will always be faster for appending messages, I expect, and they're lock-safe. MH folders won't perform as well as maildirs, and though they might once have been (and might still be) more "portable", they're losing that ground. Mbox (UNIX(tm) v7 format) remains most standard. With that standard comes less flexibility, less performance and a larger history of trouble. :) But it's highly portable -- you can even FTP mbox files to some PC and Mac mail readers and import the folders locally. I use mbox, because the way I've arranged my mail folders doesn't require high performance inside my mailer, and I generally favor portability over other features. Besides, I have 12 years' worth of mbox files in various archival media, and I simply refuse to convert them to another format without also sorting and arranging and organizing, and I haven't found time to do that yet. YM, as always, MV. If you're just getting started and you're completely unconvinced of advantages, I'd suggest going with whatever the common tools on your system support. If you're on a straight-laced UNIX system, use mbox. If you're on some new-fangled thing like BSD or Linux, you might rather give maildir a try. It's probably been demonstrated to have a future by this time, so it's probably safe for long-term use. -- -D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] NSIT University of Chicago
