On 23/12/15 08:26 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| 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? --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk mbox works well if the person writing the code knows Unix V6 primitives. If not, they can fail (;-)) For messages larger than the atomic-write size of the filesystem, mbox can have a race condition, as it depends on atomicity of writes to end-of-file to append a whole message at a time.
--dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain