[pmmail-list] PMMail and The Bat!

[Tim Roberts]

Ralph Cohen wrote:

>On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 12:21:08 -0500, KTS wrote:
>  
>
>>Yes. It converts fine. Note that your message files will be huge, 
>>single files that corrupt easily.
>>    
>>
>
>Have you actually had a problem with the file corrupting in Bat!?  If
>so, was everything lost or is there some kind of recovery mechanism?
>  
>

No, KTS is just rabidly against any e-mail program that puts more than 
one message into a single file.

In many cases, he is right, but you have to balance the philosophy 
against the real risk.  Outlook, for example, uses the worst possible 
scheme: the messages are hidden inside a single file with a proprietary 
and non-human-readable format, so if there is a problem, you are just 
screwed.  Further, Outlook is known to have corruption problems when the 
file size gets large (1-2GB).  That's an extremely high risk solution.

Many other programs use the Unix scheme, where all of the messages in a 
folder are stored together in a plain-text, human-readable file.  The 
risk here is much lower, because I can fix whatever problems might occur 
just by using *vim*, common sense, and simple copies for backup.

Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, and Thunderbird all use this approach, as does 
IMAP, for that matter.  Documented instances of corruption are very 
rare.  The real risk is quite small.

-- 
- Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

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