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[Victor Sudakov]

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.

It is interesting however that Communigate Pro uses indexed mbox as 
its internal storage format. Even under heavy load and large mboxes, 
it does not seem fragile or inefficient (from my own experience of 
supporting a Communigate server at an ISP). OTOH, Communigate is 
the only process accessing its own mboxes, and they are local, so 
perhaps this helps.

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49 at fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/