[pmmail-list] alright, I've had enough ...

[Sorin Srbu]

lists@blueprintsoftwareworks.com <> sez on Sunday, May 15, 2005 6:08 AM:

> On Sat, 14 May 2005 21:22:09 -0500, Larry Alkoff wrote:
>
>> Thunderbird is being actively maintained and has solved a lot of
>> problems I had with PMMail.  In addition, Thunderbird opens a
>> directory with a few thousand messages _much_ faster than PMMail
>> because it stores email messages in the industry standard mbox
>> format which can be used by just about any mail program around  -
>> I'm talking a small fraction of a second.
>
>> You won't be sorry if you change.
>
>
> Unless something ever corrupts your mbox or an anti-virus thingy
> "deletes the infected file" which is your mbox.

Hear, hear! That's why I enforced the use of Outlook at our department
instead of Eudora. There were just to many corrupt mailboxes and TOCs,
not to mention the infamous max 1MB sized standard mailboxes (in, out,
trash, junk etc). Took to much time to to fix, and the users ignored my
pleas to keep those mailboxes small...

> Everything is a trade-off and the "industry standard mbox" is now
> just one of the "standards" because, at the mailserver in a busy
> operation, the industry is changing to maildirs (directories with a
> file per message - like PMM) to avoid the corruption mentioned above
> as well as the file-locking that locks users out whilst a new
> message arrives, the delay during message deletion (copy file up to
> start of msg to be deleted, skip the msg, continue to end, delete old
> mbox, rename new one) and other issues.

Trade-offs galore. While Outlook may not be the very best mailer, it's
still better than Eudora. So far no complaints.

I would really have preferred a msg-based mailer instead. PMM was/is
obsolete, but I've never had any problems with the msg-files except for
the reindex-bug, which in itself is not really the message format's
fault.

> Very little of that affects the MUA except for the corruption=loss
> deal but it is important to know that the mbox "standard" is not the
> only method and likely it isn't even the majority leader by now.

What format is the leader??

> There is a plug-in for Tbird that allows the saving of messages in
> discrete files for those who would like copies of critical message to
> be secured. The mbox is still the message store for Tbird itself.

And Tbird is a clone of Eudora, or so I thought when I first testdrived
it. My experiences with Eudora and its mbx and toc-files really didn't
make me happy. As Tbird uses the same setup, is it also vulnerable in
the same way as Eudora? Ie is it also sensitive for the mailboxsizes as
Eudora is?

TIA.