Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com> said:
> In any case, your evidence is anecdotal, not proof.  It doesn't mirror 
> my own experience.  I've moved two companies to Maildir style delivery. 
>  Both were previously using Slackware/Linux 2.0/sendmail/procmail. 
> This combination was not only corrupting mailboxes, but corrupting the 
> entire file system that the spools were on. (Damn Linux 2.0... Damn it 
> to hell)

If you have filesystem corruption occurring, that means you have an
unstable system.  You can't blame anything else that breaks on the
software or design; most software assumes that the filesystem works.

I've got a server here with ~28000 mailboxes (not all get much mail;
probably around ~20000 active mailboxes), and it works just fine with
standard mbox format mailboxes.  Of course, the first thing I did was
rip out qpopper, as it was corrupting mailboxes on a regular basis.

The problem with Maildir is that it writes each message to a file by
itself.  News server operators figured out 4-5 years ago that that was a
bad design.  It works okay when you have no more than 50 messages in a
mailbox, but it doesn't scale up well when you get lots of messages in a
mailbox (which happens all too often - when I go away for vacation for a
week, I'll come back to a couple of thousand messages).

Mbox isn't perfect by any means, but neither is Maildir; mbox has the
advantage that virtually every program written to handle mail under Unix
can handle it.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.