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Re: Need for help about the "/root/sent is not a mailbox" issue

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On Saturday, June 14 at 08:34 PM, quoth Awflasher(GuoQirui):
>But then, I cannot even send anything now. It told me that:
>
> /root/sent is not a mailbox
>
>But why? What's a "mailbox" ? Can anyone give me some tips? Thanks
>very much in advance!

A mailbox is a place to store messages, and mutt can understand four 
types of mailbox: mbox, maildir, MMDF, and MH. Each kind of mailbox is 
structured in a specific way to facilitate the operations that you 
want mailboxes to perform (i.e. delivering new messages and reading 
random messages). By "facilitate", I mean that in most cases the 
internal structure is absolutely required in order to avoid corrupting 
messages.

A plain empty folder is NOT a valid mailbox.

If you're curious, I'll explain the types of mailboxes that mutt 
supports.

An mbox is a flat text file. There are requirements on the contents of 
the file and the format of the messages so that each message can be 
safely distinguished from the others. Message tags (e.g. "replied", 
"new", "seen", etc.) require modifying the content of the message.

An MMDF mailbox is similar to an mbox, but has different methods of 
distinguishing distinct messages. Again, tagging a message requires 
modifying the content of the message.

An MH mailbox is a folder containing email messages in separate files. 
This solves several problems associated with mbox, but adds different 
ones. For example, in order to prevent concurrent message deliveries 
from writing to the same file, a special non-message file is stored in 
the directory with the name ".mh_sequences" which has a special 
internal format. Again, tagging a message requires modifying the 
content of the message.

A Maildir mailbox is like an MH mailbox, but has a unique way of 
delivery that makes unique filenames easier to generate without 
locking. Its structure is a folder containing three sub-folders with 
specific names (i.e. "cur", "new", and "tmp"). Message tags in a 
Maildir are appended to the message's filename.

~Kyle
- -- 
...wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with 
their own government.
                                                    -- Thomas Jefferson
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