[Gllug] Exchange equivalents on Linux

[Philip Hands]

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Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Casper Gasper wrote:
> 
>>  I attended a presentation by a hula developer a couple of months ago,
>> and he specifically covered the mbox issue.  He claimed that ISPs
>> couldn't use maildir as they would quickly run out of inodes, and he
>> certainly didn't mention any shift to Maildir.

I got that from Alex Hudson at the Olympia Expo -- he was saying that
there's an additional plugin type thing that could be used as a method for
shifting to Maildir use, but didn't say when.

> The inode issue isn't that big a deal as it can be deal with easily enough 
> - it's just a number after all and limits can be changed.

Quite.  I think that the truth may be that they inherited mbox with the
initial code, and have not got round to examining the wisdom of that too
hard, so are grasping at straws to justify the "decision".

> More importantly ISPs tend not to run Exchange or similar systems.
> 
> The reason many ISPs use mbox is simply that it's the default option and 
> once things have been there a while it's too much trouble to change them. 
> Also it does work.

mbox is ok(ish) if you're regularly emptying it with POP downloads
(generally the case with ISPs) but can be horrendous if you get people
leaving thousands of large messages on the server, accessing it via IMAP
(more often the case in companies, and what I'd have guessed was Hula's
target audience).

The reason I don't like mbox is that it can kill mail (if the power goes
out while it's appending a message to an mbox, such that it has no newline
at the end of the file, when you come back, a message being appended will
not have it's initial "From ..." line at the start of the line, so you'll
end up with the first half of one message joined to the rest of another
message, which might not be obvious to the user, especially if the second
one is dumped into the middle of a binary MIME attachment, say)

Maildir in this case will not have got round to acknowledging the mail, so
it will still be queued somewhere (like mbox as well one would hope), and
will not have linked it from tmp/whatever to new/whatever, so you won't get
the partial message turning up anywhere, and the next message will be
delivered cleanly as per usual.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all capable of typing Maildir vs. mbox into google :-)

Cheers, Phil.
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