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List:       tuhs
Subject:    Re: [TUHS] mail (Re: off-topic list
From:       Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs () minnie ! tuhs ! org>
Date:       2018-06-25 18:59:10
Message-ID: 8c0da561-f786-8039-d2fc-907f2ddd09e3 () spamtrap ! tnetconsulting ! net
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On 06/25/2018 10:26 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> I have never understood why people get excited about Maildir, you have 
> trees full of files with names which hurt the eyes,

First, a single Maildir is a parent directory and three sub-directories. 
  Many Maildir based message stores are collections of multiple 
individual Maildirs.

Second, the names may look ugly, but they are named independently of the 
contents of the message.

Third, I prefer the file per message as opposed to monolithic mbox for 
performance reasons.  Thus I message corruption impacts a single message 
and not the entire mail folder (mbox).

Aside:  I already have a good fast database that most people call a file 
system and it does a good job tracking metadata for me.

Fourth, I found maildir to be faster on older / slower servers because 
it doesn't require copying (backing up) the monolithic mbox file prior 
to performing an operation on it.  It splits reads & writes into much 
smaller chunks that are more friendly (and faster) to the I/O sub-system.

Could many of the same things be said about MH?  Very likely.  What I 
couldn't say about MH at the time I went looking and comparing (typical) 
unix mail stores was the readily available POP3 and IMAP interface. 
Seeing as how POP3 and IMAP were a hard requirement for me, MH was a 
non-starter.

> they miss a From_ line (and are thus not valid MBOX files, i did not 
> miss that in the other mail).

True.  Though I've not found that to be a limitation.  I'm fairly 
confident that the Return-Path: header that is added / replaced by my 
MTA does functionally the same thing.

I'm sure similar differences can be had between many different solutions 
in Unix's history.  SYS V style init.d scripts vs BSD style /etc/rc\d 
style init scripts vs systemd or Solaris's SMD (I think that's it's name).

To each his / her own.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die


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