Mail Servers

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

dsr <dsr at tao.merseine.nu> wrote:
>> ...some arguments from folks who have made the switch from mbox to
>> maildirs.

Aside from the performance and reliability issues you raised, are there
software capabilities available in maildirs format that cannot be implemented
in plain-text mbox format?

For example, the reason I switched from a plain-text userpref file for
SpamAssassin to MySQL is so that I can get a capability otherwise unavailable.
 With a database, each user can maintain whitelists directly from the mailer,
and the address-book is part of the spam checker.  You can't really have those
features if you maintain plain-text preference configs.

Performance is kind of a non-issue for me, having done the babysitting for
mail servers that could handle hundreds to thousands of users on processors
with a tenth the capability of the current generation.  (Spammers are soon
going to take over the other 9/10ths, though, so I suppose today's IT admins
still have plenty to worry about in terms of performance...and spam-checking
software is a lot more CPU-intensive than a simple MTA.  However that's
off-topic because maildirs format doesn't have inherent spam-checker
capabilities.)

-rich