-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2013-08-26 a las 11:26 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
Carlos E. R. said the following on 08/26/2013 10:54 AM:
Maildir, to my knowledge, is only more efficient when you do many inserts and deletes. And frankly, with good clients like Pine I don't even notice it.
I fail to understand why you would want to modify mail messages once they have been stored. I can understand the modification of the headers as they pass though relays, though spam detectors and the like, but once they hit storage .... why? Do you really want to modify what people have said? I don't understand that.
No, not that. It is removal of a complete post, because you do not want to keep it, or because you move it to another folder. It is possible to want to add an email in the middle of the "list" (because it is sorted). Yes, normally the clients will do the sorting just fine without that. Although I do not know of a client that does it, I would like to have a client that would allow adding a comment header (and display it by default), where I could write why that post interests me - very useful for the relatively few list emails I archive; often for something they say different that what the subject line says. Pine, for instance, changes one header to mark that an email has been read, or that it is important, and it does that very fast. I don't know exactly what it changes. In fact, dovecot does the same change, because I can see an email directly with pine or via dovecot, and the flags are correct on both. Ie, both Pine and dovecot use the same flags on mbox.
Another alledged problem of mbox is concurrent ussage (like fetchmail adding an email, while the client does something else. In practice, I have never hit such a problem in 15 years.
Same here, but make that much longer. The 'problem' of adding incoming to a mailbox while reading it is not new, it dates back to the late 70s. Concurrent access for read has never been a problem with UNIX; concurrent access for write is a logical problem not confined to UNIX. But the mbox format has used sentinel flags and all mail appreciations seem to obey that simple protocol. In absolute terms appending to a file isn't going to upset another process that is simply reading from the file. In reality, the MUA will 'see' (or be notified) that the file size has increased and re-scan for new headers. How efficiently it does that depends on whether or not you allow the MUA to modify the other mail messages.
In truth, MsDos was more advanced in this respect. When the 'share.exe' additions were loaded, you could lock a section of a file for writing while reading or even writing to another section of the same file. Using another file as lock flag is, IMHO, a kludge, and may be ignored by software (the lock not enforced by the kernel).
One reason to use Dovecot and IMAP is that the MUA - Thunderbird, KDE-Mail, whatever - relies on Dovecot to tell it what is going on. Dovecot maintains metadata about the mail box. It can modify the metadata DB without having to modify the mbox itself. It keeps indexes on the mbox and they are 'cleaner' than the MUA/thunderbird (etc) might.
True. Although here I have a problem there, because I still use procmail to write directly to folders. Dovecot copes with this, but I owuld like to instead (using procmail) send that email to dovecot. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 "Celadon" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlIblv4ACgkQja8UbcUWM1wOdAD8DENBYzx7V/y/MvUptPWTjAyB NL1/tBi3A6PsXJr26R8A+wR9Zb9Ctkiph4KjGyHXaLBm9MLxQZvteTddulP0scUo =F2On -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----