| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> | | On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:17:41PM -0500, Kevin Cozens wrote: | > On 12/14/2015 01:36 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote: | > >Well deleting a message requires deleting a file, not rewriting the | > >entire mbox after that message, so Maildir is a good idea. | > | > My first exposure to Maildir was via Qmail. I thought it was a better way to | > handle lots of email than sticking everything in a single file that needs to | > keep updated as you read and delete messages. Makes you wonder why someone | > thought it was a good idea to just drop all email in to a single file in the | > first place. | | A lot less inodes, and older filesystems didn't like large directories. I've been using mbox format for almost 40 years. It seems to work fairly well for me. - performance is OK, even for horribly large mbox files - (touch wood) I don't remember anything lost due to "too many eggs in one basket" - "external fragmentation" would seem to be a problem with Maildir: file overhead (including rounding up to a full last block) is probably a significant part of the cost of a mail file. I'm setting up a new mailserver right now and I'm wondering if I should switch. I'm building a CentOS 7 system to replace a CentOS 5 one. Learning about Postfix. (I once more or less understood sendmail.) I don't use IMAP (yet?). Maybe IMAP vs mbox would be a problem. I may set up Dovecot -- does that demand Maildir?