Re: Advantages/disadvantages of various mbox types
On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 01:23:32AM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 12 at 08:31 PM, quoth Chris Green:
> >For me one of the advantages of mbox is the simplicity of the file and
> >directory naming
>
> For creating new files, you mean? I suppose I can see that.
>
I keep 'useful' (to me) mail in a fairly deep hierarchy of directories
and mailboxes, the additional layers of Maildir just make it that bit
messier to navigate and manipulate.
> >and the ease of searching (using grep for example).
>
> Now here I would disagree - I don't see much difference between:
>
> grep foo /var/spool/mail/me
>
> and:
>
> grep -r foo ~/Maildir/
That won't work will it? Ah, you're too Linux centred, grep doesn't
have the -r option on systems such as the Solaris box which is my
desktop machine at work.
>
I keep *nothing* in my incoming mailbox except mail that arrived since
I last looked there. Thus I just about never search that mailbox.
The ones I do search are down in my stored mail hierarchy and (quite
often) I search my sentmail mailbox.
Now I think:-
grep foo ~/Mail/sentmail
is distinctly simpler than:-
grep foo ~/Maildir/sentmail/*/*
> And in fact, the maildir grep will narrow you down to the exact message
> you're looking for.
Hmm, that's one of my *problems* with Maildir! :-) Having found a
number of possible hits for the string I'm searching for I then have
to run all those files (with horrible long names) through my editor.
With mbox if, for example, I find hits in 'sentmail' I just load the
file 'sentmail' into my editor, much less hassle to my mind.
--
Chris Green (chris@xxxxxxxxxxx)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."