On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Chris Shenton wrote: > I read that quote (from a couple years back) and he doesn't say how he > believes Courier IMAP violates RFC -- he just asserts that it does.
A lot of such claims seem tohave no substance... > He doesn't approve of Maildir, so anything Maildir-related is bad in > his view. Maildir seems like an ugly thing, but I don't think the guys who devised MMDF/Mbox format 20+ years ago were thinking of mailboxes with 5,000 messages totalling 2Gb in them. In the old days there were good reasons for using Mbox format (file handle starvation and limits on the total number of files in a directory (or massive slowdowns when the number of files in a directory exceeded 512)), but large user mailboxes are a _massive_ performance hit using mbox format, especially when users are leaving their mail on the server and deleting messages from the middle of the spool - the messages on this list talking about machines with plenty of CPU and ram being I/O bound while copying files in non-server mode, or CPU bound when users delete files are testimony to that. I was initially leery about Maildir format, but I have some to appreciate that it is an _appropriate_ format for the purpose of leaving thousands (or tens of thousands) of messages on the server in an individual mailbox/folder. (No matter it feels like an ugly throwback to my days of doing UUCP mail with Waffle 1.62 and its one message per file format) Times change. Mbox format is appropriate for small systems or for ISPs who don't let users keep mail on the server, but Maildir quite simply works better(*) for systems where users are holding large quantities of mail on the server. (*) Less CPU use, less ram usage, less IO grinding. Flame away. I still use qpopper on small systems, but there is a limit beyond which it's unsuitable for use - and that includes anything larger than a small ISP. AB
