default mail client

[Ralf Ertzinger]

Hi

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:41:45 -0600, Chris Adams wrote

> 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.

Handling tens of thousands files per directory has gotten significantly
better over time, and it will not get worse in the future.

> 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.

NNTP works in a different problem space. Messages are seldom deleted
randomly, most are expired over time, with the oldest messages expiring
first. This pattern lends itself very well to cyclic buffers, which would
not work with mail spools.