On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:26:29AM +1100, Tim Connors wrote:
I can think of a reason :)
Backups of mboxes are a real pain. Append 4k of text, and have to rebackup a 1GB mbox file. Maildir allows me to just link that 4k message into the backup, and effectively keep the earlier snapshots without having to purge them out earlier because I've run out of space on my backup regime.
i can think of a counter-reason that, for me, outweighs your reason :) mbox files can easily be renamed to something like listname.YYYYMM or listname.YYYYMM-YYYYMM and then optionally compressed (mutt can open compressed mbox files). I've got almost two decade's worth of personal mail and mailing list archives organised like this. for some lists, i rename them monthly, for others every three or six months. depends on traffic. very few lists grow to anywhere near 1GB in a month. or even a year. i think the highest-volume list i subscribe to is mythtv-users, and that used about 14MB from 22 Dec 2011 to today. In fact, the entire archives of the mythtv-users list on my system, spanning from Feb 2003 to today, add up to just under 1GB uncompressed. I just ran gzip -9 on them, and that reduced them to 208MB. if i stored my lists in Maildir, then mutt would have to scan through hundreds of thousands of messages for some lists, every time it opened that list. also some filesystems suck when you have more than a few hundred or a few thousand files in a directory. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>