Re: [opensuse] Best IMAP

Lew Wolfgang wrote:

I've been using wu-imap since the early '90s and have been
told numerous times about how bad it is. Say what you will
about the mbox format, but its big advantage is the files
are all ascii. This means they can be grepped and fiddled
with outside of the imap system. I once considered one of

No difference to maildir format in that regard. All mails have to survive
the transfer across various servers, so basically all mails are transfered
as text. Even attachments are converted to ascii text for that reason.
This does not mean that they are easily accessable with grep since they
are often mime encoded. Just think about all the languages that are not
compatible with ascii.

the other systems that uses maildir format, but chickened out
because I didn't want all of our 50 or so accounts being
stored in a database format. This smelled too much like MS
Exchange for me.

Uhm, IIRC, Exchange is using one file for each mailbox. Domino is doing
the same. In other words, much like mbox. (^-^)

If we are talking about Cyrus this is at least partially true, though the
mails are still stored as simple files in folders.
A real database appliance would be something like dbmail where even the
mails themselves are stored in in a mysql database.

I also don't recall ever loosing mail due to wu-imap, but
am willing to hear reasons to change. Has anyone ever had

There are some good reasons for maildir:

- performance:
If you have a LOT of mails in a mbox file it takes a lot of time to scan
the mbox for changes. The bigger the mbox files, the more users you've
got, the more you will feel this.
When you've got powerusers that have nurtured their mailboxes to sizes of
10 GB upwards and you expect your server to respond in a timely fashion
you will have to use maildir. (^-^)

- deliver security:
mbox has a long history of locking problems. This mostly affects bigger
installations, where the mbox files are stored on shared network devices
and several services might try to access the files. Maildir has no trouble
at all if ten mails are delivered in parallel to the same mailbox at the
same time. The longer a process has to lock the mbox file for exclusive
write access the bigger the change that another process will be blocked
and delivery is deferred.

- folder structure
With maildir you can use a folder structure to sort your mail on your server.

- backup:
Backup and restore can be done on changed mails only. When you have single
mbox files you have backup the entire file if just one mail has been added
or deleted.
Again, no problem with locking during backup.

All these arguments are valid even for middle-sized installations though
you might not experience these problems on a small installation.


problems with the maildir format? Do tools outside of the
imap daemon exist for manipulation of the data? Are maildir
systems compatible with "pine"? Yes, we still have pine users.

If pine can use pop or imap? Sure.


--
Sandy

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