Andrey Repin: > Greetings, @lbutlr! > > >> Guess why I'm using Maildir? > > > Because mbox was designed for a tens of Kilobytes of email? > > I have doubts it was at all designed. More like thrown together for the sake > of plugging the hole of mail storage.
Allow me to set the record straight. mbox goes back 40+ years, when computers were a lot smaller (1 MB memory, 10 MB disk) and file systems could not handle thousands of files per directory without becoming intolerably slow. UNIX wasn't the only system with monolithic mailbox files; VMS had them for similar reasons. For an early UNIX implementation from 1979, see https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/mail.c As for the format, in the spirit of UNIX 40+ years ago, it was made no more complex than was needed for the job. For more about that spirit: http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html Wietse > On a sidenote, I've seen a variation of mbox format that uses an FF (0x0C) > character as message delimiter, and do not do any body encoding. > > > -- > With best regards, > Andrey Repin > Friday, June 28, 2019 15:34:04 > > Sorry for my terrible english... > >
