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[Tim Chase]

On 2018-12-13 22:05, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
> mbox still serves my needs and has never failed me.  why would I
> want to invest time and effort to change to something (anything)
> else?  maildir does not "work better" as I can see.

Perhaps you're not putting strains on mbox that others have.  I've
found that mbox works well in certain conditions:

1) only one reader/writer (no other scripts/tools touching your mail
store) on local file-systems

2) particularly well if your mboxes are mostly append-only (it tends
to perform worse and have more risk of data-loss if you're modifying
messages in the middle).  The one-big-file-of-mail also compresses
nicely if stored on a ZFS volume.

I have had mbox files break when on NFS shares and when multiple
programs are writing to them (especially when removing messages from
the middle of the file).  Sometimes I'm lucky and it's not grievous
and I only lose a message or two or things get sheared removing the
intra-message markers, putting one message at the end of a previous
message.

-tkc