On Jun 28, 2019, at 6:39 AM, Andrey Repin <anrdae...@yandex.ru> wrote: > 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.
To be fair, email used to be a lot smaller, systems used to be a lot smaller. Even as late as 1992 when I got a backup of my entire home folder on a single 9 track tape my 5+ years of email and all my files added up to less that 100MB or so (the capacity of a 9-Track). But then again, we didn’t have HTML or even MIME that I recall back then, and if we had MIME it was suspiciously new. > 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. That is MMDF. I think the first M stands for mutt? I’ve never seen one of these files in use. Mbox was fine for what it was intended for, which was never single files in the 100s of MB much less in the GBs. There are many better mailbox formats now. I use Maildir which I like because I can still dither with it easily on the command line, but it’s by no means the best one out there, and large servers do not use it. (Well, really no one uses milder anymore, but rather maildir++ but that is a technically with nearly no meaning to anyone). Dovecot implemented dbox in several flavors, but I really don’t know anything about it or how prevalent it is. I hear it is much better than maildir for large user bases, but it is only supported by dovecot. Maildir is widely supported (postfix, exam, courier, mail drop, even proemial!). For a while I fought with Apple’s Mail.app which used MH, but now I do all my mail tweaking on the server and leave Mail.app alone. I am not sure if it is still using MH or not. Exim uses (used to use?) mailstore by default. I remember running exim when I switched from UW-IMAP to Courier briefly long ago and quickly switching to postfix, but I don’t remember what it was about exim I disliked. -- No sense being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway.
