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Benjamin A'Lee wrote: > >> 2. Debian reference says it is essential to put mail in Maildir -- otherwise >> Courier won't work. Exim4 config says Debian usually likes mbox format. >> What is the point of Maildir, if any? > > Maildir is faster under certain circumstances; mbox stores a whole mail folder > in one file, so has to read in the entire file to read or write to it. Maildir > doesn't, but if you're searching a lot it's slower, since it needs to open > every file individually. Or something along those lines. mbox is obsolete ;) Seriously, the problem with mbox is that by putting all the email in one file, you readily end up with files that at 300MB in size, and easily corrupted. To do anything with such a file (except append a new email, or delete the lot) is a massive resource commitment on the part of the mail server. Whilst there are some operations that maildir makes more expensive, I think most people would be hard pressed to demonstrate that mbox is better for them, especially after the first time their email program screws up and trashes an entire folder instead of one email. A common operation, moving email from inbox to folder is literally a rename for most maildir implementations, or at most copying one small file with maildir. The same operation with mbox depends on how much email you got delivered (and in the destination folder - sent folder anyone?), and the day you get 500MB delivered, you suddenly realise why maildir is so much cleaner. I think similar comments apply to the worlds most "popular" (frequently used?) email client, which joyfully puts all of the email in one big database file (rather than just each folder), and will joyfully corrupt it, and destroy every change since the last backup. And needs a special backup to make sure the database is closed and quiescent..... yuk. I still have some mbox folders around, I had to break the sent folder into separate years, because opening it was too painful. Simon
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