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

[Rod Whitworth]

On Sun, 15 May 2005 17:08:24 +0200, Robert Dahlem wrote:

>On 15.05.2005 06:08, Rod Whitworth wrote:

>>> 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.

>Urban myth, dangerous smattering.

Urban myths have widespread belief amongst the ignorant. This fact is hardly known about in those circles.
It isn't common but it isn't unknown. I don't deal with too many Winnies that have mbox. (If they use LookOut! I 
refuse to have anything to do with them and their single file.)

>Never saw a corrupted mbox in 20 years. There is no simpler format and
>it hasn't the main drawback of one-file-per-message-format: snail's pace.

You haven't done much work on corporate servers or at a hosting service have you?

The snail's pace thing is not relevant to well managed systems. For MUAs having all of the saved mail still in the 
inbox with 1000 files there hardly causes PMmail to blink. Much more and it sags but then all it takes is a bit of 
housekeeping and things are fine. I get the ones that complain to organise the stuff they wish to save into folders 
and that works well.

At the server where the snail story had its genesis things have changed. POP servers never really had a problem 
as mail is commonly downloaded and deleted from the server in one operation. The RFCs allow this to be 
mandated and that gets rid of hoarded mail.

Very large mailstores use hashed directories for the maildirs to overcome slowing due to too many directories in 
one parent and in the case of IMAP (where all the mail is on the server) quotas and user folders mitigate the 
problem to where it is not an issue. Quotas can be very effective.

In any case there are filesystems that don't suffer degradation with huge inode lists per directory. Where I do work 
on large servers we don't use those because we are not yet satisfied as to their total reliability.

Also be aware that there are simplistic tracts that would have you believe that maildir storage was totally useless.
UW, (in)famous for the security records of its ftpd and imapd/pop3d published one some time ago.
http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/  shows a well documented experiment to test the validity of that 
paper. A link to the UW text is included.


>When mentioning mailbox corruption: are you're possibly talking about
>Outlook's PST?

Askiing me to work on Microsoft applications is like asking a neurosurgeon to do a colorectal resection.

~|^

Now I must get back to work ........... on configuration of two new servers for Australia's largest auction house and 
a separate split MTA/MDA multi-domain system for the hosting service that is currently handling the auction 
mail. The latter is to replace a system that came with an mbox only server. Loss of mail for some of the clients due 
to a hardware glitch caused much angst. Now tell those users how good mbox is. Oh and yes, backup got their 
mail back but not the stuff that arrived between backup and the failure.


>Regards,
>        Robert


In the beginning was The Word
and The Word was Content-type: text/plain
The Word of Rod.