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Old 13th February 2009
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
Here's another mail related question: which mailbox format do you prefer? mbox and maildir seem to be the two most popular, but there are others.
Don't use mbox unless you don't value your data.

mbox stores each "folder" as a single text file, with the messages all concatenated together. Deleted messages leave holes in the file, and only 1 process can be updating the file at a time. If a process crashed mid-update, you lose the whole "folder". Very slow as well, as the entire file needs to be read to generate the folder listing. Just don't use it!

maildir uses real folders for each mail folder, support sub-folders, and stores each message in individual files. Multiple processes can be updating folders, although only 1 process can update each file. You can multi-task properly (delete messages, create new messages, update messages). And you get much faster performance.
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