On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:56:25AM +0000, Jon Dowland wrote: > For anyone else following along at home who is slightly puzzled by all this, > <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html> > explains the different mbox formats, what 'From_' means, etc.
Quoting from that page: # With the advent and now widespread adoption of the superior Maildir format # over the past several years, the entire "mbox" family of mailbox formats # is gradually becoming irrelevant, and of only historical interest. which is no news. And you can't really run a mail server in mbox if you ever receive mail from business users: for them, sending the text as an image wrapped in a Word document is the rule rather than an exception[1]. With mbox, every access requires linearly scanning the whole file. Users tend to keep loads of junk so you can expect multi-GB[2] mboxes. There are two typical cases for mta installations: * a real mail server: you need to be able to handle large mails * no mail other than cron/etc: storage type is irrelevant So, what's the reason mbox is still the default in Debian? Among other gains, data loss because of mboxo would be gone. [1]. Bonus points for printing out your plain text piece of mail, highlighting something with a marker, adding comments in pen, scanning it back and then mailing. [2]. Let's take a look at one of my users' ~/Maildir. I whine about too much junk from time to time[3], asking to delete at least pointless attachments, so the two biggest dirs are "only" 2.8GB and 2.3GB, both around 6.5k pieces, the largest of which is 48MB. [3]. Out of a habit, I guess. With current disk sizes, no one should care about a few gigs here, a few gigs there. Unless you need to read a mbox linearly, that is. -- How to squander your resources: those silly Swedes have a sauce named "hovmästarsås", the best thing ever to put on cheese, yet they waste it solely on mere salmon. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121127153215.ga26...@angband.pl