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[Cameron Simpson]

On 13Dec2018 18:26, derek martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 08:46:23AM -0800, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>> On 2018-12-13 23:15, Victor Sudakov wrote:
>> > If I knew how to convert all this stuff to Maildir storage... Do I
>> > have to convert all of them at once?
>>
>> No, mutt can handle maildirs and mboxes alongside each other.  It just
>> looks at what kind of file/directory it is dealing with at runtime.
>
>But I believe Dovecot can not... unless that's changed.  It was the
>reason I never switched to it, since I often read my mail locally and
>use both formats.

Yeah, it is quite annoying. We runs dovecot in Maildir mode on our EC2 
VM (we self host our email), but only access it with IMAP (or POP). I 
pull stuff locally from it and read with muttlocally.

I think I'd use offlineimap if the IMAP server was my primary email 
store, so I could IMAP (from my phone or remotely) and mutt on the local 
copy.

>You should also be aware that mbox does have advantages over maildir
>in terms of performance, depending greatly on your access patterns,
>system configuration, and Mutt configuration.  Maildir is often better
>for frequently-visited, frequently-pruned mailboxes, whereas mbox will
>likely do better for large archive folders.  Maildir + header caching
>improves the case for Maildir in some, but not all, cases (and if mbox
>is also supported by header caching now, that goes out the window, but
>I don't recall it ever being added).

The tricky bit with mbox and header caching is that if the mbox is 
modified outside of mutt, mutt has to invalidate the entire cache.

>Your filesystem also matters...  On older systems, maildir would fail
>horribly with very large numbers of messages in a folder because the
>underlying filesystem was very bad at dealing with them.  On modern
>systems that's typically much less true, but the details matter.

Generally mbox is more compact in terms of disc usage. But less 
flexible.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>