maildirs (was rolling Firefox back to 2.x

[Derek Broughton]

Rashkae wrote:

> 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.
> 

It's been a couple of years since I even used postfix, but it was just the
default setting for maildir delivery at the time.
>> 
>> 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.

Really, that's preposterous.  Most programs that deal with mail are quite
aware whether they're dealing with an mbox or a maildir.  It's this little
thing called a directory.  I've played with multiple MTAs (qmail, exim,
postfix and masqmail), multiple MDAs (procmail and maildrop), and multiple
IMAP servers (dovecot, courier and uw) and all of them can be configured to
have your mail anywhere you want it, but some default to /var/mail and some
default to ~/Maildir, and it's just easier to symlink the two.


> Incidentally, the common belief that maildir is automatically superior
> and faster to mbox is very false.  Maildir is faster at sorting messages

I never suggested faster - it's more secure, because corruption of one
message can't damage another.

> 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.

Indexing, in particular, should not be much different on either system.  You
index as the message comes in.  Since messages don't actually change, there
should be no extra overhead either way.
-- 
derek