On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
A previous poster suggested MH, and as I read more about MH (and this is only
a first glance, late at night (disclaimer posted!) I read about the fact that
its formats are horribly non-standard with regard to the rest of the world.
I don't see why anyone would say that. mh, although relatively old, is
neither non-standard nor particularly difficult to comprehend. The
messages are simply files in a directory, so message 23 in the "foo"
mailbox is foo/23 in wherever the mh path is located.
A local netnews spool is much the same.
maildir is far more complex, all in the name of being NFS-safe (and it
isn't really).
The problem with one-file/one-message formats (including maildir) is of
scalability. They're alright if you have a 3-digit or low 4-digit number
of messages in a single mailbox, but when you get to 5 digits or more
(which seems to happen in this evil day and age of spam...) then you start
running up against directory size and inode performance issues. Some
Linux filesystems do much better than traditional UNIX FFS, but it just
defers the problem.
An additional issue for IMAP is the need to calculate the message size in
CRLF newline format, and most of these formats (UW imapd's mx being an
exception) store the messages in UNIX-style LF-only format so you can't
get the information from stat().
mix avoids both of these problems.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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