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Re: mboxes and maildirs in .muttrc



On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 09:05:39PM +0100, sigi wrote:
> Thanks a lot for all your replies! I've changed my mailboxes to 
> maildirs now - and am not messing around with two formats anymore. :)

There *are* advantages to both...  Their  performance characteristics
(and behavior, unfortunately) are different.  Maildir is well suited
to mail stores kept on NFS, because it avoids locking issues.  It is
particularly fast at deleting messages amongst a large number of other
messages in a mailbox, because it is a single file delete, whereas
mbox message deletes generally require the mailbox to be rewritten.
On most platforms (i.e. filesystems), mbox typically opens large
mailboxes faster (even with header caching enabled, I believe, and
usually *much* faster without it), making it a good choice for large
archives (up to the maximum file size on your system).  Another
notable difference is in new mail notification and mailbox switching.
Mutt's maildir implementation is better at remembering that you have
new mail than its mbox implementation is...  The mbox implementation
"forgets" that you have unread mail in an mbox folder once you have
visited a folder and left it, whereas maildir remembers.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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