S. Beaulieu wrote: > Alex Baer a écrit : >> But in the Mozilla mail >> clients it's possible to create virtual folder hierarchies and sub- >> structures. And this is DANGEROUS with mbox. I have had no problems >> with only one level of hierarchy (i. e. flat structure) using mbox. >> >> So my request is actually: Either remove the capability to create >> folder structures, or make it reliable. >> > > > What kind of unreliability are you talking about? I'be been using the > same mbox file (folders and all) since 1997, successively moving from > various versions of Netscape to Thunderbird, then to SeaMonkey. I never > had any sort of problem, corruption or otherwise. > > Of course, I compact my folders regularly and don't keep thousands of > emails in my inbox (that's what the folders are for), so that might have > something to do with it. > > From my experience (since I manage all my relatives' computers and > they've gone through the same mbox evolution as I have), I've never seen > any problems with that file format (unlike Outlook's notorious "let's > get automatically currupted once the file reaches X Mb" problem, for > example). > > S.
As I said, not the mbox format as such is the problem, but the functionality that is implemented in Mozilla mail clients, that stretch this flat file format to something it isn't supposed to be. Because the functionality is there, I used it, and created a multi- level hierarchy of folders, sub-folders and sub-sub-folders to organise my mail. This may or may not have been a great idea, but it became a huge problem, when after a crash the index files were damaged, and the program was unable to repair them, and all the structure information about the hierarchy of folders was lost. The result: Many mails had no meta data, anymore. That made it impossible to distinguish emails that were included in the last backup from new ones. Therefore I had to check them individually, manually comparing mails on my system with my backup. It took me many hours, to get it fixed. After a second crash with quite the same hassle, just with a lot less email messages being affected, I switched to KMail, and NEVER had such a problem again. As far as I can tell, this is for a big part not an achievement of KMail as such, but owed to the file format in which mails are stored. What is more, the pseudo-hierarchy can be resolved only by Mozilla clients. Other programs don't know what to do the index files. Now, opening an mbox file with another mail client, and then opening the file again with a Mozilla client may also cause index file corruption, in my experience. So this is a very fragile approach. As long, as there are index files simulating hierarchies, that are not really there, for virtual folders containing thousands of emails, this is a harmful functionality. Pseudo-hierarchies should not be supported in combination with mbox, IMHO, as this approach is bound to cause trouble --- it's only a question of time. And, BTW, a quick research of the web will tell you, that I am by far not the only one who experienced this sort of problem. I very much like Seamonkey, it's functionality, it's UI etc. But I need a more robust mail client. With maildir (or mh) support, Seamonkey Mail could be it, but I don't trust it, as long as it only supports mbox with index files (and again: the index files are the problem, actually, not mbox as such). Alex _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
