On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 07:45:01AM +1030, Tim wrote: > >> And depending on your mail client, it keeps a local copy of the > >> mail in one or the other formats. So file system benefits may be > >> undone, either way. > > Les Mikesell: > > Generally the client and server are on different machines. > > True, but then some of us aren't blessed with numerous machines. ;-) > For home use, there's little justification for having a box as a > standalone server (electricity costs, etc.). And likewise, as I think Les also mentioned, there's little justification for accessing the mail through IMAP if you're reading the mail on the same machine. It's hugely inefficient. Just read it locally and you eliminate the wasted space. > >> e.g. Using Evolution and Dovecot with mbox (it started that way, and now > >> I'm considering changing to maildir because it's getting slow), I end up Well, you should consider that for some operations, such as initial mailbox opening, maildir is actually substantially SLOWER than mbox. This can be improved with a good caching implementation, but mbox can also benefit from such caching, so mbox still wins if it's done right (again, for *some* operations). It seems to be a common misconception that maildir is generally faster than mbox. It isn't. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses... > >> with a ~/mail/ directory full of mbox files per folder, *and* a > >> ~/.evolution/ directory with mostly the same thing in a different > >> format. > > > If you are running on the same machine you might as well either > > let evolution see the mbox/maildir storage itself or download > > via pop so evolution has the only copy. You only need client/server > > operation if you are on another machine or use different clients > > from different locations. > > I use different terminals around the place. That's why I went for IMAP. Huh? > I don't know whether I trust it to not munge up local maildir stores > that something else fetched/organised. mbox is mbox is mbox... Its implementation is decades old and well understood. Unless you're running a version that's known to corrupt mailboxes, this is just not an issue. > I'd like a better client, anyway. It leaves a lot to be desired in a > few areas (messy quoting that needs manual intervention, difficulty in > only polling one server out of many for your mail, etc.). Mutt + vim or is the way to go! =8^) > > No, Thunderbird doesn't cut it. It has the added disadvantage that > interprets the messages, HTMLising even plain text, as far as the > display is concerned. How could it "HTML"-ize plain text? If there's nothing in the plain text for it to use as HTML, what is it doing? -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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