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Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Feb 24 23:42:36 UTC 2008


Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> said:
>> You could do a lot of what imap offers just by standardising the MUA
>> backends to maildir, but everybody talks about the UI and forgets the
>> backend part (in fact it's quite surprising we managed to get good imap
>> servers out since we insist on using last century's tech with mbox and
>> sendmail as our defaults)
> 
> Maildir solves one problem with mbox (deleting an arbitrary message)
> while making a whole bunch of new ones (the biggest being a directory
> with 10,000 files is not good).  Dovecot's mbox+index seems to work
> pretty well in my experience.
> 
> I find it funny that at the same time NNTP servers were moving away from
> a one-file-per-message storage format due to the many problems, Maildir
> (and its variants) was trying to move towards that format.

You generally don't delete messages individually from nntp servers with 
a human waiting for the next operation, whereas moving and deleting are 
probably the most common things to do to a received email message.   And 
if your filesystem isn't good at handling a reasonable number of files, 
that's probably something you should fix anyway...

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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