D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote on 2023-11-23 22:20:
I don't remember seeing that corruption in the last few decades of using
mbox.
I didn't notice it 'til transferring providers and looking back at old
message folders. No idea how long it's been lurking around.
Probably nothing of value lost, but ... data loss is enough to make me
very, very concerned.
The horrors of in-band signalling are well known -- maybe the
software I use reflects that knowledge.
Pretty sure a power outage while writing to a multi-megabyte file would
be enough corrupt it with most software? Unless some form of atomic
transactions / file system journal is used?
And when all messages are in one file, it can cascade. Apparently.
Particularly annoying when a screen full of messages (in the messages
pane) have no subject, date, correspondents, and looking into the mbox
there are HTML messages, and mime encoded parts - a nightmare to try to fix.
As John pointed out, a "From" mid message needs special handling too - I
don't know if that is handled differently in Maildir, but sure feels
like a sloppy hack.
You mentioned that you were running out of space on your system. If a
lot of that space is mail messages, I would bet that Maildir is costing
you a lot of it. Each message is taking a multiple of the allocation
unit size (1KB? 4KB?) and a large part of that is likely unused (the
tail of the last unit). My intuition would be that since mail messages
are usually short, and the distribution of sizes isn't uniform, you are
probably using at least 25% more disk space with Maildir.
Probably true, but if a file gets corrupted, I only lose one message,
and it's more likely to be recoverable.
Also, consider RAID-1: 100% extra disk space versus storage capacity.
Often seen as worthwhile, for similar reasons.
I dunno, I may decide to switch back, but so far it's been working well.
If anyone's considering running Maildir, I recommend the layout=FS
option set in mail_location.
Otherwise a folder structure like:
Archives/2023/11
shows 3 entries in the file system of server like:
.Archives
.Archives.2023
.Archives.2023.11
Ugh.
Cheers,
rb
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