Possible iMAP server

[John Chambers]

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.


--
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   O
 <:#/>  John Chambers
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