On Mar 2, 2005, at 11:35 PM, John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
Why? 1) The *only* NFS safe mailbox, PERIOD. 2) easily grepable. (if you
want to find that one message with the string you want, since each
message is its own file, grep will report the filename which is the
message) 3) no doubts as to where a message ends and where it does not.
4) no From_ quoting (hi, MBOX!) 5) No locking, no corruption.
6) easily merge maildir trees without overwriting or losing any messages; merging multiple Maildir trees with rsync results in a union of all those Maildir trees.
7) restoring mail from backup, particularly after a partial loss (i.e., "I deleted these seven very important emails from a client yesterday, and didn't realize it until today") gets trivially easy, like #6, above. After restoring the particular maildir folder in question, the only remaining "damage" is that some deleted messages have returned. Having had to do such a restore before with mbox files had me nearly tearing my hair out trying to make sure I didn't screw something up. And, believe it or not, this is a request that comes through a couple times a year.
8) Maildirs are ready-made for multiple, simultaneous access by client programs. This is particularly handy when it comes to IMAP servers. Personally, I frequently end up with mail clients running on two or more machines (laptop, workstation at work, sometimes also webmail if I'm testing something, etc.) and mbox-based IMAP servers *cough*uwimap*cough* will kill any existing connections when a new one is established, causing mail clients to disconnect and behave rudely. Because of the complete lack of need for locking for Maildirs, there's no need to enforce a one-at-a-time approach to access.
I'm sure there are more reasons...
Gregory
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