Re: maildir structure and change dir
On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 03:02:19PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 09:50:31AM +0100, Mike M wrote:
> >
> > 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.
That's what I did. It worked - sort of - when I descended to lower
level I got stuck there with respect to the c-<tab> navigation
technique. If I used the c-? method I would somtimes get the ~
directory instead of ~/Maildir directory. Maybe I've got some wierdness
in my .muttrc.
>
>
> > 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.
Thank you. You just saved me a bunch of learning time.
>
>
> > 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.
Hmmm. Good to know. Maybe the disk block allocation thing plays into
the recipe. I like the message == file idea nevertheless because I
think (and I've read as much) that message processing is easier as a
result. I want to put the email into an RDMS for permanent archival.
>
> --
> Chris Green (chris@xxxxxxxxxxx)
>