Brett I. Holcomb wrote:
Is there any advantage to one over the other? What are the pros and cons of each.
Thanks.
Hey Brett,
There are probably more advantages for each than I'm aware of, but here's what I'm aware of:
.maildir is less prone to corruption, because where mbox is just one large file, maildir consists of many small files, so if one email message gets corrupt, the rest of your mail won't be lost.
There should be more advantages than that, but that's all I can think of. (I do use maildir myself on my server.)
As for mbox, for one, while .maildir requires a lot of read/write operations (at least one for each file), mbox is just one large file, so it's less of a tax to the system in that respect.
Also, .maildir has the tendency to fill up your inodes really fast if you have a large scale server, so in some cases where you're dealing with large scale stuff, mbox may be preferable.
That's all I can think of right now. Hope that helps :)
All that being said, I'd say use .maildir unless you have a specific reason for using mbox as, at least in my opinion, it's easier to work with mail in that format, especially if you're doing things like filtering mail for viruses/spam, or even just using a filter to drop mail into different folders. My 2 cents :)
James
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