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

[Sorin Srbu]

Rod Whitworth <> sez on Monday, May 16, 2005 3:17 PM:

> On Mon, 16 May 2005 09:29:41 +0200, Sorin Srbu wrote:
>
>> 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...
>
> I hate to rain on your parade but a single file mailstore is a single
> file mailstore.
> Delete one file and it's gone. Corrupt it (and that is easier with
> OutBreak or rather, harder to fix if done the right way (by murphy))
> and no backup=no mail

I'm well aware of that. 8-) That's why we have a (working) backupsystem
here. 8-)

Also the users have been warned and recommended to keep their pst-files
at 250MB as the max limit. Anything higher and their on their own.


>>> 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??
>
> I think it is split and moving to maildirs but there are IMAP and
> POP3s that let you choose (why with IMAP I just can't figure - users
> have freedom to move messages around from one "folder" to another)
> and there are proprietary mailstores (Cyrus) databased ones (dbMail,
> Domino). Really I think the statistics are, as usual, fictional snap
> decisions 97.328% of the time. 8-)

I fugured as much; it depends on who you ask. 8-)

>My one reality is that I am seeing
> more maildirs than mboxes, in new installations that I didn't do,
> where the installer didn't just take the default. I use nothing else
> now and I've been using mail since the UUCP days so I've been through
> a few methods though I can't claim that I was doing anything like
> mail when I joined IBM in 1962 and it only became reasonably
> available to me in the late 70's

You've been around, haven't you... ;-)


>>> 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?
>
> A single file ........... but it depends on two things: (i) how well
> the app manages the file.

Ah, as apparentely Eudora does not. It's actually quite astonishing that
those Eudora developers haven't fixed that weakness yet. I mean, Eudora
has been along like forever. But then we have the similar PMM-case...
It's really sad to see such a good mailer as PMMail go to waste. I
really wish Blueprint software, or whoever owns the code now, that
they'd release it as opensource, then maybe we'd finally see some good
modifications and development of it, IMHO.


>and (ii) whether some external event can
> get at it. It seems that nearly everybody writing MUAs is an out of
> work Unix hacker trained in Sendmail and maybe that's due to many of
> the new ones (MUAs) being designed for Linux where they'll fit right
> in with Sendmail or that horrible UW crap.

Ok, you lost me at UW. What's UW?

> I can't comment about Eudora size probs as I have no experience with
> it. I can say though that a planned retirement project is to write an
> MUA, probably in Python, after I see just waht happens when the Unix
> clocks overflow in January 2038. My latest OS (OpenBSD v 3.7) won't
> overflow the clock - feed it a high enough seconds count and it just
> stops incrementing so Time will stand still if they change nothing
> else and I'll never get to be 100!
> But that has to be better than going 136 years into the past..........
> Take care!

You too!