[Gllug] Mailbox compacting

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 12:30:54AM +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> Hi
> 
> t.clarke wrote:
> > I am not sure whether this is remotely relevant or helpful as I am not sure
> > about 'mailbox' format!    Our emails (on a SCO box) are held in  what I think
> > is mbox format of  4 delimiting binary ones at the start and end of each email.
> 
> Part of the problem with mbox is that there isn't really a formal format
> specification. However, I've not come across any mail storage format
> delimited that way which claims to be mbox.
> 
> The quick version of the generally accepted mbox format is that mails
> are just separated by a blank line followed by a line which starts "From
> " (note there's a space after 'From' and this is important because
> "From:" will almost always be in the headers and you don't want to split
> the mail there!)
> FWIW, this explains why emails which have a line in the body which
> starts "From " will be rewritten to "> From " in some mail clients
> (because it would confuse simple parsers).
> 
> mbox is a horrible format to work with because it's so unpredictable and
> can perform poorly. Having said that, it doesn't eat inodes all day like
> maildir (which can also perform poorly).

http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html is an interesting read on
this subject.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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