Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com
What's so bad about maildir? [...]
Splattering one mailbox across three directories and N files seems pretty wasteful and is a bit of a pain to process. sed, mboxgrep and other tools work very fast with mbox...
I am not familiar with mh though.
It's file-per-mail in one directory. Maildir uses three to avoid causing locking problems with defective MTAs or filesystems. It has lots of collatoral damage, like dictating one set of flags onto all MUAs handling the maildir, encoded into the filenames.
I'm not sure, but I think DJ Bernstein either invented it or likes it a lot, which may indicate to many which planet it's on.
Why can't we have a proper database for holding our mailboxes, does this exist ? [...]
Most people get scared if their email isn't easy to backup. A database-backed emailfs or an email-optimised search would be a cool way to do that.
Hope that helps,