[TUHS] mail (Re: off-topic list
Grant Taylor
gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net
Tue Jun 26 04:59:10 AEST 2018
On 06/25/2018 10:26 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> I have never understood why people get excited about Maildir, you have
> trees full of files with names which hurt the eyes,
First, a single Maildir is a parent directory and three sub-directories.
Many Maildir based message stores are collections of multiple
individual Maildirs.
Second, the names may look ugly, but they are named independently of the
contents of the message.
Third, I prefer the file per message as opposed to monolithic mbox for
performance reasons. Thus I message corruption impacts a single message
and not the entire mail folder (mbox).
Aside: I already have a good fast database that most people call a file
system and it does a good job tracking metadata for me.
Fourth, I found maildir to be faster on older / slower servers because
it doesn't require copying (backing up) the monolithic mbox file prior
to performing an operation on it. It splits reads & writes into much
smaller chunks that are more friendly (and faster) to the I/O sub-system.
Could many of the same things be said about MH? Very likely. What I
couldn't say about MH at the time I went looking and comparing (typical)
unix mail stores was the readily available POP3 and IMAP interface.
Seeing as how POP3 and IMAP were a hard requirement for me, MH was a
non-starter.
> they miss a From_ line (and are thus not valid MBOX files, i did not
> miss that in the other mail).
True. Though I've not found that to be a limitation. I'm fairly
confident that the Return-Path: header that is added / replaced by my
MTA does functionally the same thing.
I'm sure similar differences can be had between many different solutions
in Unix's history. SYS V style init.d scripts vs BSD style /etc/rc\d
style init scripts vs systemd or Solaris's SMD (I think that's it's name).
To each his / her own.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
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