On 23/12/15 08:26 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| From: Lennart Sorensen <[email protected]>
|
| On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:17:41PM -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote:
| > On 12/14/2015 01:36 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
| > >Well deleting a message requires deleting a file, not rewriting the
| > >entire mbox after that message, so Maildir is a good idea.
| >
| > My first exposure to Maildir was via Qmail. I thought it was a better way to
| > handle lots of email than sticking everything in a single file that needs to
| > keep updated as you read and delete messages. Makes you wonder why someone
| > thought it was a good idea to just drop all email in to a single file in the
| > first place.
|
| A lot less inodes, and older filesystems didn't like large directories.
I've been using mbox format for almost 40 years. It seems to work
fairly well for me.
- performance is OK, even for horribly large mbox files
- (touch wood) I don't remember anything lost due to "too many eggs in
one basket"
- "external fragmentation" would seem to be a problem with Maildir:
file overhead (including rounding up to a full last block) is
probably a significant part of the cost of a mail file.
I'm setting up a new mailserver right now and I'm wondering if I
should switch. I'm building a CentOS 7 system to replace a CentOS 5
one. Learning about Postfix. (I once more or less understood sendmail.)
I don't use IMAP (yet?). Maybe IMAP vs mbox would be a problem. I
may set up Dovecot -- does that demand Maildir?
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mbox works well if the person writing the code knows Unix V6 primitives.
If not, they can fail (;-))
For messages larger than the atomic-write size of the filesystem, mbox
can have a race condition, as it depends on atomicity of writes to
end-of-file to append a whole message at a time.
--dave
--
David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
[email protected] | -- Mark Twain
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