On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 02:30:57PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On Jul 3, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> > 
> > The one clear win that maildir has over mbox is that it's much simpler
> > to write a good implementation.
> 
> What *could* be done with mbox is completely irrelevant to me.

That much is obvious; nevertheless you did blame it for certain
problems, and I felt obliged to point out that your problems are
absolutely NOT caused by any technical limitations of the file format.

But my dissertation has gone far afield of Jerry's original question,
and indeed they don't help him decide whether to use mbox or maildir
on his home dovecot server (or any other server he might choose).  But
all your protestations over mbox didn't really help either: they're
complaints that he's never going to see, in his two-person home e-mail
environment.  Having now gone over all the gory details in far greater
detail than I ever planned to, I still stand by what I wrote earlier
in the thread:

[for performance reasons]
On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 03:29:29PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> It really depends on your usage patterns.  

And I'll add that it depends on the server implementation.  Last I
checked (a very, very long time ago) UW-IMAP only does (essentially)
mbox and IIRC didn't do any (persistent) caching or indexing of the
mail store for it (it does, however, support its own goofy indexed
variant of mbox, IIRC).  Dovecot does index, so it should have real
performance wins for both formats.  Courier does only maildir, and I'm
not sure what else you'd consider...

[and in summary]
On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> Maildir is fine, and does solve some problems that mbox has; but it's
> not the e-mail panacaea that the fanboys want it to be.  Mbox still
> has its advantages too.  If you're only ever going to access mail
> through your server, and it's well-implemented and not terribly
> broken, then it probably doesn't make any practical difference whether
> you use one or the other.  Choose whichever one makes you feel better.

He should just be careful that if he chooses maildir, and if he
archives lots of mail (as I belive he does), he should be sure to have
plenty of inodes on the filesystem where his mail store will reside.
For his environment, pretty much nothing else will likely matter.

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