[Gllug] Large mail files was -> RedHat

[Stig Brautaset]

* Walid <walidshaari at yahoo.com> spake thus:
> mbox files have been used, and will still be in use for time to come, why I
> have chosen Maildir for our servers is because I read that following article :
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html
> 
> I have seen also some bench marks where mbox is superior scaling, and
> performance wise as one disadvantage of maildir is that they eat your inodes
> more quickly!

That's not the only problem with maildir vs. mbox when it comes to using
mutt.. I had heard a lot about how good maildir was, so I though I'd try
it. I ended up going back to mbox, which for my needs seem far superior.
Here's some reasons from the top of my head (YMMV of course):

1 - It you are in a mailfolder and new mail arrives in said folder then
    if you are using mbox mutt can instantly tell you about it. If
    you're using maildir then you can forget about that feature (well,
    it *does* exist, but with a maildir of some size it's horrendously
    slow and completely unusable, so you end up turning it off). 

2 - Maildirs seemed to open up slower than corresponding mbox files
    containg the exact same mails. This might be rectified if you're
    running ReiserFS or something, but at the time I was running ext2.

3 - Mbox is a simpler format, and hence simpler to work with :-) E.g. I
    found the mbox backup/restore cycle easier than with maildir.

Regards,
Stig

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