On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 10:58:06AM -0500, Gopi Sundaram wrote:
> On 21 Mar 2001, Mark Delany wrote (quoting me):
>
> > > Thus a user can check their email via IMAP or (shudder) POP from
> >
> > Why shudder? POP is by far the most reliable service of the two
> > and much simpler and supported by more clients.
>
> http://www.imap.org/papers/imap.vs.pop.brief.html
And what is your *own* opinion? I prefer POP because IMAP makes users
leave mail on server, amongst others.
> > Remember, if the mailboxes are in Maildir format, they can safely
> > be shared across NFS. A simple configuration might be:
>
> I'm reluctant to move to Maildir until we can get more MUAs to support
> them (specifically Pine and Netscape).
Uh. You are confused. Are you providing pop+imap or shell services? If
the first, then clients just have to support pop or imap (which they
do). If the last, Maildir patches for Pine exist, and what idiot runs
Netscape on a shellserver?
> > It's not really specific to qmail, but Maildir makes this a much
> > more viable solution compared to the locking and performance
> > nightmares associated with V7 mbox format used by sendmail and
> > mail.local.
>
> I've heard that the maildir format may have scalability issues because
> of the number of files that it deals with (bunches of open(), read()
> and stat() calls). Is there any truth to this?
Yes, Maildirs can get slow when they contain several thousands of
messages.
Depending on your storage system, this may or may not be a problem. A
NetApp has no trouble with it at all. FreeBSD's FFS does slow down
when a Maildir gets *really* big. ReiserFS and XFS probably have no
problem with it.
The performance win compared to mbox is still tremendous, however.
Greetz, Peter.
