Re: mbox file size limitations?

In regard to: Re: [Imap-uw] mbox file size limitations?, Dan Lukes said (at...:

> I can' withstand to answer you using your own footer:
>> Better is not better, 'standard' is better. B{
>
> Classic "UNIX" format used by most of MTA. It's de-facto standard. It's
> simple and because its just text, it can be processed by simple tools
> available on every system. And it can be read even with no tool at all.

We all prefer "simple" where it solves the need, but huge mbox format
files with tens of thousands of messages are quite inefficient to parse.

If you're determined to stick with mbox format, then I strongly recommend
you look at the dovecot IMAP server.  It has an approach to indexing
mbox that I really wish Mark would have taken, instead of the MBX/MIX
route.

That said, when we were still hosting our own email, we migrated from
mbox to MBX, which was a huge performance win, and I've used MIX too,
on a smaller scale.  With an adjusted setting for MIXDATAROLL, it works
very well.

> For MIX no broken mailbox repair tool exists.

There are.  In the extremely rare case where I've had to use them
(much less common than doing MBX repair), they work well.

> Finally, I hate 1-file/message format because large number of small messages 
> received will overload underlying filesystem (i-nodes are limited
> resource)

On many filesystems, that is true.  Not all, though.

Also, MIX is a nice compromise between mbox and maildir, since it can keep
multiple messages per file.

Tim