Hi Ivan, On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 15:51:50 +0100 UTC (11/2/2003, 8:51 AM -0600 UTC my time), Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
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.
I> There are pros and cons. I> Searching throu a dir is an O(n) operation generally. I> open is comparatively more expensive than read and seek. I> maildir requires much more open than mbox. Agreed. I> Now we can have more fine grained locking. Furthermore on a single I> user mailbox concurrent read/write operations aren't that frequent. interesting. Thanks for this. I> Neverthless you're right. Maildir is less subject to mayhem. I> Corruption of one file is corruption of one email not a whole set of I> emails. Anyway I tend to think that protection agains such kind of I> troubles should be carried out somewhere else (backup, reasonable HW, I> file system...). I wholeheartedly agree with your protection mechanisms above. There is no substitute for this, IMO, also. -- Gary Dain bramaged.