maildirs (was rolling Firefox back to 2.x

[Rashkae]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Rashkae wrote:
> 
>> Huh? Isn't it standard practice to move maildir inboxes into the user's
>> home directory to avoid confounding the plethora of processes that
>> *expect* /var/mail/* to be mbox?
> 
> Well, now, that may be - if it's "standard" though, somebody forgot to
> publish the standard.  I've been unable to find any good argument for one
> way over the other, and this was Postfix's choice.  Dovecot, otoh, expected
> the mail to be in ~/Maildir - and the two are symlinked.  I don't know of
> anything that "expects" /var/mail to be mboxen, but no doubt there are
> silly programs like that.

How did Postfix make this choice for you exactly?

It's been a couple years since I experimented with this, so I'm fuzzy on
the details, but I do remember the postfix documentation example of a
maildir config including the use of $user/Mail or some such in the
destination directory.

> 
> I _think_ I really want mail in the user dirs, just to keep it with the rest
> on backup, but it's still most convenient to symlink /var/mail/$USER to
> ~/Maildir

Convenient why exactly?  Anything that's preset to look there is
probably also preset to expect mbox.

Incidentally, the common belief that maildir is automatically superior
and faster to mbox is very false.  Maildir is faster at sorting messages
between directories and deleting messages, and is probably a necessity
on storage for several simultaneous users for that reason.  However,
just about everything else (indexing/reading mail, and especially,
searching through the bodies of a very large mail store and backing up
your mail folders) are much faster on mbox.