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Re: mboxes and maildirs in .muttrc



* Derek Martin on Monday, February 02, 2009 at 18:17:14 -0600
> 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),

Nope, here on MacOS 10.5.6 HFS+ opening Maildirs with
tokyocabinet hcache backend is *much* faster than opening mboxes.
Depends a lot on the filesystem -- MacOS 10.4 was slower wrt
Maildirs + header cache ... or the header cache implementation
has improved since I upgraded ;-)

c
-- 
\black\trash movie    _C O W B O Y_  _C A N O E_  _C O M A_
Ein deutscher Western/A German Western
-->> http://www.blacktrash.org/underdogma/ccc.html
-->> http://www.blacktrash.org/underdogma/ccc-en.html