[Nottingham] email woes

[Robert Davies]

On Wednesday 10 Sep 2003 19:17, David Bean wrote:
> I'm messing with my email, so it's nicer. What is the benefit of using
> IMAP, over mounting home with the Maildir in?

Well if it's a remote mount traditionally NFS locking has been difficult to 
get right, even Sun used to need jumbo patches.  The Maildir format avoids 
most of locking issues, but writes are simply faster on a local machine, 
where net clients tend to use synchronous writes for safety.

IMAP can give more flexible support, say you were to use an ssh tunnel, to 
connect to your home machine, from the Internet.  Then you could use an IMAP 
email client to check new mail.  Of course mutt/pine/elm users would laugh, 
considering they just have to login.

> I'm currently using fetchmail, exim, then courier-imap, then evolution
> (on 2 pc's). Would my setup be simpler if I cut out courier-imap?
> Is Maildir suitable for multiple connections at the same time?

The KDE Kmail program seems to think so, actually recommends Maildir format, 
when it notices mbox format folders, being touched by a spam filter under 
training.

Disadvantage of Maildir is that your can end up with directories with 10,000's 
of small files in them.  ReiserFS handles this without space wastage but a 
4KiB ext2/ext3 might occupy a lot of space.

Rob