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[Will Yardley]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 07:37:28AM -0600, Tim Chase wrote:
> 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.

mbox over NFS (especially old or improperly implemented NFS) can be an
issue.

However, with many filesystems, Maildir has its own set of
inefficiencies, especially for very large mailboxes. Tho there are
certain operations that are easier, because you just have to stat the
files to get the status of each message, vs. parsing a big file.

I use a combination of the two; for situations where I'm never using
IMAP and always sshing somewhere to read mail using Mutt, I do slightly
prefer mbox.

w