On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 06:19:02PM +0000, John Chambers wrote:
> | The one clear win that maildir has over mbox is that it's much simpler
> | to write a good implementation.
> 
> The reason I prefer maildir is that I tend to feed a fair number of  my  mail
> to assorted programs, most of which I wrote, some from other people.

And (summarizing the rest of what you said) the one-message-per-file
format of maildir generally makes it easier to feed the raw mail store
to programs than with mbox.  

That's a fair point, but I tend to look at this more as an indicator
of how poor most MUAs are, than as a limitation of the file folder
format.  You shouldn't need raw access to the mail store to use
external tools on them; your MUA should make it easy to do this,
regardless of the underlying format of the mail store.  And some do;
Mutt is perhaps the shining star in that camp (or at least one of
them).

> With mbox, this is a very tricky thing to attempt, especially since
> "the mbox format"  is  different  on  nearly  every  machine,  and
> is rarely documented anywhere.  

There are some different variations, but I think you exaggerate the
case a bit.  There are two main variants that require different
processing, with some variations that, in my experience, don't matter
that much to how you process them (though I admit, it's been quite a
while since I needed to care).  In my 12+ years of involvement with
the Mutt community, it's been extremely rare that I've seen someone
report a problem with an oddball mbox variant, and I've never
encountered a problem with it myself having used Mutt on 5 different
platforms (Linux, HP-UX 9, HP-UX 10, Solaris 2.5-2.8, and Windows).
*Somebody's* got this figured out... ;-)

> With a maildir, a user can usually feed the messages  to  just
> about any non-email software, which will typically ignore the
> headers and just look for stuff in a recognized format.

Mutt, and I daresay any decent mail client, allows you to do this
irrespective of the folder format.  I'd agree that it's nice that you
can do that with maildir, but it's not nice that lots of MUAs
basically force you to go looking for solutions to those problems.

With Mutt in particular, you can even tag a group of messages, and
perform the same operation on each (i.e. pipe them all to the same
program essentially at once).

> For a trivial example, I routinely use grep to  find  messages  that
> mention things.   This  fails totally with mbox, since it always
> reports that the one file matches.

With mutt, you don't need to use grep, because it has that
functionality built in.  In addition to using standard regular
expressions, it also has tags, or "pattern modifiers" to tell it
exactly how or where to search.  So, for example, you won't get false
matches if you're looking for a message that has a subject line
containing the word "foo", and someone happens to include in their
email a line like this:

Subject: I ate foo for breakfast

(say, for illustrative purposes, as I just did).  You can tell mutt to
look for foo only in the actual Subject line of the message by telling
it to search for ~s foo.  It will give you a list of messages that
match.

The downside to Mutt, in particular, is that it's only console-based
and has a steep learning curve.  With power usually also comes
complexity.  I've heard good things about some of the newer GUI
mailers, but I've stuck to Mutt because -- for a number of reasons I
won't go into -- I've historically found it most reliable to read mail
locally on my server over an SSH connection in screen.

FWIW, while administration of e-mail was one of my responsibilities
(this was ages ago, and at the time UW-IMAP was pretty much the only
game in town for free IMAP servers, which IIRC basically only did mbox
and its own weird variants), a handful of people approached me with
problems like "I want to grep my mail" -- I pointed them at Mutt, and
most of them took to it and never looked back.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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