Direct delivery, whether via tmail/dmail or some other mechanism, is
always superior to snarfing.
Besides the (substantial!) overhead in copying, the more advanced formats
(mbx and mix) store mail in native Internet style CRLF-newline format.
Traditional UNIX format uses UNIX-style LF-newline format for texts; the
upshot is that an expensive newline conversion is done when delivering to
a traditional UNIX format mailbox, only to be undone by another expensive
newline conversion when the message is snarfed.
Snarfing is by nature a more complex and thus fragile mechanism than
direct delivery.
The only advantage of snarfing is that it doesn't require the cooperation
of the system manager (or at least the maintainer of the SMTP server) to
deploy it. Snarfing is also alright as an interim measure, if you aren't
fully certain you're ready to commit to one of the more advanced formats
and/or want to test for a subset of users.
But for long-term production use, you really want to go to direct
delivery.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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