On Tuesday, July 12 at 01:24 PM, quoth Kumar Appaiah:
But when I converted my mbox'es to maildirs, the space occupied was almost 50% more.
Chances are, most of your email messages are around 2kb in size, right? Problem being: on most filesystems, a file must be made of "blocks", which on most OS's, defaults to 4kb in size. And of course, files can't split up blocks, so every file is, at minimum, 4kb. When you concatenate them together in one file (i.e. mbox) you can put two 2kb messages into a single block.
The primary benefits of Maildir over mbox is concurrent access, especially for delivery, and the speed of making changes (e.g. deleting a random message) because only one file is affected. The primary benefit of mbox over Maildir is space-efficiency (as you've discovered) and header-reading speed (because the OS doesn't have all the overhead of additional open()'s).
Personally, I prefer Maildir for my servers because I find it easier to manipulate them with shell scripts, and disk space is not as critical an issue. YMMV.
~Kyle --There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
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