On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 02:38:06PM +1100, Alexander Samad wrote: > On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 02:32:32PM +1100, Jamie Wilkinson wrote: > > This one time, at band camp, Alexander Samad wrote: > > >thanks nicier, but as a side question any ideas on how I lost lines, > > >there were there before the change to Maildir > > > > You got the lines count because in mbox format it's easy to work out > > when parsing the mailbox file. In maildir format, it requires more > > processing and since you don't need to know how long the messages are to > > parse them all, it's not done. > > > > Line counting in mbox parsing is a trivial extension, in maildir it's > > unnecessary overhead. Reading the Lines or Content-Length headers > > (which I think is what Jeff is referring to) and relying on that is bad > > practice for mail readers[1], but displaying the values it thinks are > > correct is merely cosmetic. > > > > [1] > > http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/content-length.html > > Okay agree, but still the underly question I have is my only change has > been in my procmail rc file and the change has gone from > > ~alex/imap/mboxfile > > to > > ~alex/Maildir/.mboxfile/ > > The jist off it is, my the change in the mbox format the lines header > was there and in the Maildir format it is not. > > If you are saying that procmail says hey its maildir and I don't need to > insert that attribute, thats cool. But this hasn't been made clear.
My understanding is that when using mbox format, having a Lines: header makes parsing the mbox faster, so MUAs like mutt add it if it's missing. And since you have to scan the whole mailbox anyway, it doesn't add any processing overhead. For Maildir mailboxes, having a Lines header doesn't help with parsing, and you get better performance by initially just reading headers rather than bodies as well, so MUAs like mutt *don't* add said Lines header. OTOH, it does seem to generate more than it's fair share of questions/ complaints. So I think it's a mutt thing, not a procmail thing, and supposedly a feature rather a bug. :-) Cheers, Gavin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
