begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 11:35:01PM -0800: [snip - mbox good ~ inode depletion] > Why? 1) The *only* NFS safe mailbox, PERIOD.
If you're using NFS for your mailbox, then yes. You want maildirs. > 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) I mostly want to find out what *folder* contains certain strings. For this, I like grep -l; with a maildir, I not only have to use */* instead of *, I have to play some shell games to get just the folders that contain the strings in question. So I count (2) as a disadvantage of maildirs. > 3) no doubts as to where a message ends and where it does not. Indeed. Nice feature. > 4) no From_ quoting (hi, MBOX!) Very nearly a part of (3). > 5) No locking, no corruption. Locking isn't hard, and I've only ever had one problem with corruption (from a very-long UTF spam). > If that is not enough to sell you, I don't know what is. Some people > consider mail too important a thing to risk. Maildir removes all risk > other than hardware failure. And user error, of course. I already use directories in my mailbox directory to organize things. A maildir scheme would intermix these special-purpose subdirectories with mail folders; I'd have to adopt a naming scheme to keep things organized. Maildirs have only a *slight* advantage over mbox. Not _quite_ enough to push me into converting. -Stewart -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
