[ILUG] 2 quick mail questions.

[John P . Looney]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 09:49:56AM +0000, James Raftery mentioned:
> On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 07:20:41PM +0000, Conor Daly wrote:
> > format.  Doesn't matter that much here at home but it could get
> > significant on a real mail server...
> 
> Real mail servers usually have a farm of SMTP/POP boxes sharing access
> to a common filestore containing user mailboxes. This is where Maildir
> shines. It doesn't need any file locking and is safe over NFS.
> 
> Disk space is cheap these days too.

 I've a sent mailbox that's got 2500 messages in it, using just over 10MB.
It's over NFS, on a Reiserfs partition. It takes four seconds for mutt to
read that in. Not too shabby - though when I converted it just there to
mbox, it's only five seconds - and the mail file went down to 4mb!

 I'll still use Maildir though - I have no problems running mutt from
home, reading my mail - with mutt in work having that mail folder open too
- no race conditions, no problems with locking. It rocks (ok, so grepping
through mail files is more effort..)

Kate, who has on occasion had to manually fix a mail spool that got corrupted somehow

-- 
 When I say 'free', I mean 'free': free from bond, of chain or command: 
to go where you will, even to Mordor, Saruman, if you desire. " 
    -- Gandalf, paraphrasing the choice between Free and Non-free software