** Chris Green chris@areti.co.uk [2005-11-04 09:53]:
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 09:24:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 15:28 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Can't mailsync do that without maildir? Maildir always looked to me like a third-choice format for normal users, after mbox and mh.
What's so bad about maildir? Personally it seems a lot more sane to me that just having one huge file with all my messages concatenated together.
It makes the computer/programmer side of things easier but it spoils the users' view of things to my mind. Although (I think) I'm changing from mbox to maildir it's because I want to take advantage of some of the technical advantages, I'm losing some usability in the process.
Surely the users' view of things is dependent on their mail client and totally transparant to mbox, maildir, mh, database or whatever. I'm curious to know what usability is being lost from the switch from mbox to maildir. I switched some time back because I found mbox files a pain to work with if I wasn't using a mail client, and they were also getting a bit slow and cumbersome. Maildir made things a lot easier.
Maildir is inherently more difficult to manage because a mail folder is so complex, it's a directory with three sub-directories and files with messy long names. Mbox folders are just files. So if I'm trying to do things 'manually' (i.e. from the command line) it's much, much easier with mbox. For example grep just works without any clever additions, for maildir you need special tools for searching messages. Another example is that it's easy to automatically remove empty mbox folders, a zero length file is empty. As this thread has indicated it's decidedly non-trivial to remove empty maildir mailboxes automatically.
Different view points I guess, but I find Maildir easier to do things with manually since each piece of mail is a different file and if it is new it is in a different directory. I guess I don't automate many things with mail folders (bar filtering on the way in), but then I'm generally a bit paranoid about deleting things in general!
<snip>
Why can't we have a proper database for holding our mailboxes, does this exist ? Surely it could help with advanced searches etc ? Also for multi user / Multi Mailbox systems it could do what exchange is supposed to do and only hold one copy of each attachment regardless of how many mailboxes link to it.
The UW (originators of IMAP) view is that the two 'best' places to be are either mbox (which is why UW IMAP works only with mbox) or a database such as Cyrus.
The problem with the database approach is that there is no universal standard so you can't pick and choose your MUA if you are using a database approach. OK, Cyrus is an IMAP server with a database behind it but I'm not convinced that IMAP is the answer to everything either. I've yet to find an MUA that works well (and consitently) with IMAP.
Yes, Cyrus I wrote off very early on because it locked my mail away in a format I couldn't access - I tend to like local access to my mail with Mutt and secondary access if necessary through an IMAP client (although I've been primarily an IMAP user for a year or so and have just switched back to Mutt). Until I moved onto Linux and Mutt I was a Netscape/IMAP user for a long time (mid 90s iirc and Netscape Messaging server).
** end quote [Chris Green]