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Derek D Martin wrote: | > --Rich P. | | The one clear win that maildir has over mbox is that it's much simpler | to write a good implementation. The reason I prefer maildir is that I tend to feed a fair number of my mail to assorted programs, most of which I wrote, some from other people. With mbox, this is a very tricky thing to attempt, especially since "the mbox format" is different on nearly every machine, and is rarely documented anywhere. You have to study your mbox, and upgrades to the mail software can change the format without warning. The people who write the email software seem to consider the mbox format an internal, secret thing, which mere users (even when programmers) have no business mucking with. The maildir format, OTOH, tends to be fairly consistent. And even when there are differences, it's fairly easy to ignore them. This is because your software is probably going to just muck with the message contents (which is no business of the email software ;-), and will leave the headers alone. This is fairly safe, and it's rare for "outside" software to break anything in a maildir based system. The software ports to new machines with different email software with relatively few problems. Of course, non-programmers might dismiss this as irrelevant, since they don't write their own software. But it also means that with mbox format, there is little reliable add-on software. With a maildir, a user can usually feed the messages to just about any non-email software, which will typically ignore the headers and just look for stuff in a recognized format. For a trivial example, I routinely use grep to find messages that mention things. This fails totally with mbox, since it always reports that the one file matches. -- _' O <:#/> John Chambers + <jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org> /#\ <jc1742-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> | |
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