On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 08:31:23 -0600
Gary
Yes, but more importantly, mbox format is just one huge file of emails, constantly growing, and yes, each email is separated by the From: at the top. Your MTA and MDA (Procmail) must lock the mbox file first to add mail. Now, /Maildir/ format stores each email individually instead of adding email to the existing mbox mail spool. This is why it requires no locking, safer, and can be used over NFS.
There are pros and cons. Searching throu a dir is an O(n) operation generally. open is comparatively more expensive than read and seek. maildir requires much more open than mbox. Now we can have more fine grained locking. Furthermore on a single user mailbox concurrent read/write operations aren't that frequent. Neverthless you're right. Maildir is less subject to mayhem. Corruption of one file is corruption of one email not a whole set of emails. Anyway I tend to think that protection agains such kind of troubles should be carried out somewhere else (backup, reasonable HW, file system...).