On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 08:51:23PM +0200, Theo Schmidt wrote: > Do these problems also apply to Thunderbird, do you think, Nick? I have > just switched to this even though I prefer kmail to Thunderbird, because > I don't trust kmail any more for the mbox format and am not yet ready to > switch to maildir (using ext3 and not reiserfs). (I hope asking this > question isn't heresy on this list.)
I don't find the choice of filesystem makes a major difference to personal mail, if you're not running a big mail hub :-) Reiser would be better if you're running maildirs with more than, say, a thousand messages (finger in the air figure :-)) but I found that Mutt is a couple of seconds slower to open a large mailbox when it's 3000 files rather than one. I user Reiser here because it's good at recovering from crashes, there's no lost+found on a Reiser filesystem cos files don't get lost! I prefer maildir though as it's much quicker for Mutt to write the 'read' status and any other changes you make, such as re-threading or deleting large attachments. Kmail is also good for this as you can filter stuff to your heart's content, into loads of not-so-large maildirs. It's not hard for a programmer to lock a mailbox against conflicting changes even if it is all one mbox, anyway. Mutt manages its mail by modifying private headers and I think trad Unix mail tools do the same. I think Netscape Mail as well, and hence presumably Thunderbird does. Pine keeps its status in a special first mail, which can confuse people when they read it with anything else. I think kmail's a pretty good mailer, but it lacks a way to interwork when I want to mail from the command line. I tend to leave kmail running on the main mailbox so that filters can redirect stuff. Mutt, at least, also can't (AFAIK) read kmail's maildir++++ format, indexes or no ! I only wonder if there's an issue with mailboxes on remote servers. If you can only RETR or DELE a mail, you kind of need an outside index :-) Nick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
