Re: another silly question
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 01:11:17PM -0500, David Champion wrote:
> * On 2005.05.05, in <20050505112905.GC8472@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> * "Vincent Lefevre" <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > This is not a problem, as mailboxes created by Mutt (e.g. for postpone
> > or user archives) will normally be read only by Mutt.
> In my experience that's not true. Thousands of my users use at least
> two mail applications. We've counted. We've made charts, tables, and
> graphs. Of those mailers, only Mutt understands Maildir. Virtually
> everything understands mbox.
I think the OP's point was that these other mailers probably use
different names for their postponed / fcc folders. Not saying that's
necessarily true, but I think that's what they were saying.
I'm guessing that in many (most?) environments, the majority of users
are reading mail via POP3 or IMAP - this may not be true at your
university, but it's probably true in most environments these days - and
in that case, the end-user usually doesn't care what format their mail
is stored in as long as the POP / IMAP server understands it.
> Maildir provides better resilience under NFS, but how many people really
> encounter NFS problems with their mail?
The issue is that with mbox, it is very important that file locking
works, or users can end up with missing email or a corrupted mail spool.
So while people may not encounter NFS problems with mail, it's good to
use an NFS safe format (and / or make damn sure that file locking is
working properly) when delivering mail to an NFS-mounted location.
And yes, there are valid reasons for doing this. The main reason is that
it's one of the easiest ways to scale mail out to multiple machines -
add more machines, and mount the mail spool and / or users' home dirs
over NFS.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion here - I fully agree
that mbox is the best _default_ format for mutt.
> What's actually *wrong* with mbox as a default, other than that it's not
> your preference?
Really the biggest problem with mbox is that it's easy to have problems
IF you don't set things up properly. This is true with Maildir as well -
just maybe not to quite the same extent.
w