Re: maildir structure and change dir
On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 09:50:31AM +0100, Mike M wrote:
> > > specify using "mailboxes" command in .muttrc. It's flat structure
> > > instead of
> > > an hierarchy. The GUI email clients I've used are hierarchical.
> >
> > The strange 'flat' maildir hierarchy you see with '.' delimiters is an
> > artefact of the Courier mailserver and some other software.
>
> I actually created it myself.
>
> > It's a
> > valid approach to a maildir hierarchy but it isn't required. I use
> > maildir with mutt and procmail and I have a genuine directory hiearchy
> > of maildirs which works perfectly well (and is created by procmail and
> > mutt).
>
> What is the technique to navigate the hierarchy? Do the parents of the
> hierarchy have /cur, /tmp, /new subdir? Are there any .muttrc mods to
> make it work? I suspect there is more to getting folder hierarchy to work
> than
> simply creating directories.
>
Each member of the hierarchy that contains a 'mailbox' has cur, new
and tmp subdirectories, directories that are just layers of the
hierachy (as opposed to mailboxes) don't have cur, new and tmp.
That's all there is to it as far as I know.
> I went to my kmail system (mbox type )and looked through the /Mail directory.
> I
> found all sorts of voodoo in there to support hierarchy. Each subdir was
> hidden and formally named (.subdirnameIchooseinKMail.directory). Each
> subdir had two associated files: .subdirnameIchooseinKMail.index and
> .subdirnameIchooseinKMail.index.sorted. I don't know if this is kmail
> voodoo or the "mbox way". By induction I reason that if mbox hierarchy
> is not straight forward than it is reasonable that Maildir hierarchy is
> not straightforward. This then is my hypothesis for research going
> forward.
>
That's just kmail voodoo, an mbox hierarchy is very simple, just the
mbox files themselves (instead of the cur, tmp, new of a maildir) and
the directory hierarchy above, that's all. This is all that mutt
needs.
> I found some of my mbox files to be huge. I save lots of email - never
> know when I'll need something. Attachment saves are just stupid but
> it takes my time to clean them out and disk space is cheap. No wonder kmail
> was limping
> along so poorly.
Maildir is even less space efficient, I found that my main mail
hierarchy doubled in size when moving from mbox to maildir. This
depends very much on individual mail message sizes, lots of small ones
will be less efficient in maildir.
--
Chris Green (chris@xxxxxxxxxxx)