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On Friday, September 4 at 05:32 PM, quoth Chris G:
>> The advantages are:
>>
>> - reading/writing/moving/deleting messages is faster than opening an
>> mbox, looking for the right message, editing it, then
>> rewriting the whole mbox.
>>
> Possibly faster for a *program* to do but not so easy for a
> person to do directly.
<sarcasm>
This is exactly the same reason that we still use punchcards for data
storage. Sure these fancy magnetic storage media are faster for
*computers* to read and write, but they're a pain in the butt to edit
by hand. If I see an error in a punchcard, I can just use scotch tape
or a hole-puncher to fix it. But with magnetic storage? Forget it!
</sarcasm>
What's your point?
Perhaps you edit mbox files without using these newfangled things
called "programs". You prefer to simply load kernel modules to edit
them? Or perhaps you break out the oscilloscope? Otherwise there's a
*program* involved. And if you're complaining that your program
doesn't make it easy to find/edit/save email messages stored in a
Maildir, perhaps the real truth is that you're using the wrong KIND of
program. For example, we abandoned the idea of using text editors to
edit the content of SQL databases; that doesn't mean SQL databases are
a bad idea.
>> - grep returns individual messages, not an mbox to search through
>
> But on the other hand you have to do a recursive grep through a
> hierarchy of directories. With mbox there is a simple text file whose
> name is the name of the mailbox so you can easily 'grep <name of
> mailbox>' to search for something.
I don't understand your complaint. Is 'grep -r nameofmailbox'
difficult to type? Is this an argument about the number of keystrokes?
Plus, your "simple" alternative doesn't provide the same features. Yes
you can 'grep nameofmailbox' with mbox, but that only tells you
whether the text you want is in that mbox, not which message within
the mbox it's in. It doesn't even tell you which LINE it's on. Sure,
you could use the -n flag to print the line number, but that's just as
difficult as using the -r flag, right?
> Depending on what/who created the maildir hierarchy you may find
> it virtually impossible to move directories (which aren't real
> directories) and mailboxes around.
Why not?
~Kyle
- --
If Jack Valenti had been around at the time of Gutenberg he would have
organized the monks to come and burn down the printing press.
-- ITAA president Harris Miller
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