Anders, On Monday 09 August 2004 13:58, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Monday 09 August 2004 22:36, Randall R Schulz wrote:
I use mbox format, not maildir, which strikes me as an insanely bloated way to store email
This statement requires elucidation
mbox and maildir store the exact same information, except that mbox *adds* an additional "From" header to signify envelope sender. So mbox actually stores more data. Assuming you are using a sane file system - like reiserfs for example - that is capable of filling up disk completely and not leave little empty "tails" for half filled blocks, á la ext2/3, it will consume *less* disk space. So how is it bloated
...
I did a little experiment to gauge the internal fragmentation overhead of "mbox" vs. "maildir" storage in KMail when using an XFS file system. I had four small- to medium-sized mailboxes to import. I imported them into an mbox folder (the import function seems to ignore the global default folder type when creating a folder for import) and then copied the contents of those four folders to maildir folders. Then I used the "du" command to compute the amount of mass storage occupied by each of the eight mailboxes (four files for the mbox and four directories for the maildir). The difference is significant (output reordered to ease comparison): % du -s Mail/{,MD-}JayToRandy200? 756 Mail/JayToRandy2001 1052 Mail/MD-JayToRandy2001 7352 Mail/JayToRandy2002 9024 Mail/MD-JayToRandy2002 8076 Mail/JayToRandy2003 10832 Mail/MD-JayToRandy2003 7460 Mail/JayToRandy2004 8796 Mail/MD-JayToRandy2004 The folders' message counts are: ...2001: 141 messages ...2002: 841 messages ...2003: 1192 messages ...2004: 684 messages The percentage increase of maildir storage of mbox is: ...2001: %39 ...2002: %23 ...2003: %34 ...4004: %18 _That_'s why I prefer mbox to maildir! Randall Schulz