Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:10:50 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: <scanner@jurai.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: postfix && Maildir Message-ID: <15144.50666.530025.411934@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <129215819@toto.iv>
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scanner@jurai.net types: > > >And understand the negatives of using the Maildir format? > > No. Could you please point me to some documentation on that? > Go look through the postfix mail list archives at www.postfix.org for > Maildir. Basically what it boils down to is if you have very little mail > Maildir is just as good as mail box format. But the more mail you have the > suckier Maildir performs. It's *alot* easier to deal with one large file > then a directory with tons of smaller files. Especially for searching. So > basically if you never go above a handfull of mail it won't matter to > much. But the more you throw at Maildir the worse it gets. My experience is just the opposite. Once you start having lots of mail - more than a few megabytes - to deal with, maildir is much easer to deal with than one large file. Trying to manipulate single messages in files with a few thousand messages in them is a major pain; doing anything but appending a message to the end of the mailbox means copying large chunks - if not all - of the mailbox. All operations - moving, deleting, and appending - are about the same speed on a maildir. That speed depends on the speed of the underlying directory system, I'm it's generally better than the time taken to copy all the data in the directory. You are also forced to use special tools to search such an mbox formatted file, as the standard unix tools - or even specialized ones, like WAIS - can't really do much more than pin things down to a single file. That's obviously pretty pointless if you've only got one file. On the other hand, it's pretty trivial to use standard Unix tools to locate all the messages in a maildir that match patterns like "have 'foo' in the From line and 'bar' in the subject line." If you have real references about problems - as opposed to "look at the site of an organization with a bias against the format" - I'd be interested in hearing about them. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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