> > Is there any particular need for maildir?
>
> Other than that it would let me use pine's aggregate sorting, grouping,
> and saving functions to re-sort things after I'd have used the dozens of
> tools available to convert a unix mailbox to mailder (which mailutil
> won't do for the same reason I can't open the file in pine)....
>
> No.
I still don't follow. Why can't you do these things in pine with other
formats? Why maildir, in particular?
Perhaps it's some limitation of pine that I'm unaware of (since I don't
use it).
> A previous poster suggested MH, and as I read more about MH (and this is
> only a first glance, late at night (disclaimer posted!) I read about the
> fact that its formats are horribly non-standard with regard to the rest of
> the world.
Standard or not, one of the reasons I suggested MH is because you asked
for something that would "[s]plit them [your folders] down into their
component messages" which is what MH would do since its format is one
message per file.
The other reason is that it sounded like you might want to do some fairly
hefty processing, and MH is about the only mail "client" suitable for
batch processing of large numbers of messages, since the MH commands can
be used in arbitrary scripts.
> >> I'm slowly investigating the use of alternative (non-mbox) file formats
> >> system-wide, but support for them is sketchy unless I want to stay
> >> "married" to c-client. MBX seems to have issues with NFS. Maildir is
> >> just disgusting to me (other than as a reformatting tool in this case).
> >> MIX, I hear good things about.
> >
> > What does system-wide use have to do with your original request? I thought
> > you were only after a bit of one-off processing, and I would have
> > thought changing to MBX or MIX would be enough for you to do any of
> > the maintenance from pine that you say isn't possible with your
> > unix-format folder (assuming it is possible with these other formats).
>
> Simply put: I'm becoming of the slow opinion that the unix format is
> archaic and should be beaten with a stick.
OK, but that's not the question you asked in your original email, AFAICT.
> If I find a method that's
> superior for me, it stands that it may also be superior for my userbase.
Even though I use MH, I wouldn't indiscriminately recommend it to
everyone else; it depends on what you do. It is often very suitable as
a *temporary* format for batch processing, however, which is what I
understood was the general direction of your original question.
> However, this takes into consideration that I'd have to migrate EVERY
> procmail recipe that currently handles delivery.
>
> (...why procmail can't have the same smarts as c-client and just
> auto-detect a mailbox format while delivering, grumble grumble. Why you
> can't just tell procmail to use dmail for al delivery tasks, grumble
> grumble...)
Why not just get procmail to pipe the messages to dmail? That's
the intended use, and I wouldn't have thought it's a big change to
any procmail recipe.
Cheers,
- Joel
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