Gary, On Thursday 12 August 2004 14:44, Gary wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 04:21:54PM -0500 Danny Sauer wrote:
Randall wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] KMail question' on Wed, Aug 11 at 20:14:
<snip>
_That_'s why I prefer mbox to maildir!
mbox - all mail is in one file, a bunch is lost due to the failure. maildir - one message per file, part of one message is lost due to the failure.
One other factor, Maildir does not use any locking as mbox does
Make no mistake about it. Concurrency control has to happen, whether it is via an explicit use of a file locking system call or protocol or whether it is hidden in the operating system's file system code.
One of the benefits of the maildir format is that, even though it doesn't use locking to prevent simultaneous updates from different delivery agents, it's reliable. This means maildir mailboxes can safely reside on NFS-mounted filesystems.
Virtually all of my mail is accessed via POP3 servers (I pick up a trickle via my login's /var/spool/mail drop file, where root's mail is redirected). There's only one me, here, and I can only use one mailer at a time, so there's no chance of lock conflicts on the mail storage used by KMail. Lock overhead is not an issue.
you can't use mbox on NFS and expect mail not to be lost or have broken spools.
NFS is irrelevant to me.
-- Gary
Randall Schulz