On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 03:16:39PM -0500, dman wrote: > > BTW, What's with this ~/Maildir thing I keep seeing mentioned? Where > did that come from?
Maildir is an alternative method of storing mail invented by djb and first supportd by qmail; procmail, maildrop, exim, postfix and several other packages know about it. Mutt supports it well; pine supports it with a patch; several emacs-based mailers know it. Lots of mail-related software can use it. Maildir stores each message in exactly one file; it guarantees not to lose mail, and does not require locking, even over NFS-mounted directories. It is fast for mail delivery and deletion; grep works for searches because each file is a separate message. It can be slower to load an entire folder than mbox because it needs to grab many files instead of just one big file. -dsr-
