[Dovecot] tags disappear in Thunderbird (OT: Maildir preference)

[Ron Leach]

Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Daniel Luttermann put forth on 9/21/2010 5:02 AM:
> 
>> I would also use maildir for all mailboxes instead of mbox for
>> inbox...
> 
> Do you have technical justification for this recommendation, or is this
> merely "personal preference"?

Could I offer our reasoning for choosing Maildir?

I made the decision that we would use Maildir because I was worried 
about the effect of loss of a single file.  As I understood it, mbox 
stores all the messages in single file and, if the file was corrupted 
and couldn't be recovered for any reason, then we'd lost a whole lot 
of messages.  We back up to alternate machines, anyway, but backup 
systems fail to secure us when or if a file is deleted mistakenly, for 
example, and not quickly noticed, say.

We hold corporate emails dealing both with clients, and with statutory 
bodies.  In our country, there are legal obligations on corporate 
entities to interact with statutory authorities (tax, registration, 
etc) electronically, so loss of email messages may contribute to 
compliance defaults which can carry penalties.

We also had to convert our historic emails from a windows platform - 
this was maybe 2 or 3 years ago now.  The script, that we used, 
converted to Maildir slightly more competently - I think one date or 
other in the message was better converted, but I cannot quite 
remember, now.  I only remember that converting to Maildir was 
slightly easier or better than to mbox.

So our reasons are:

(1) Risk aversion - we simply do not want the hassle of losing many, 
many emails just through a file failure

(2) Easier conversion from other formats, in our case

Interested to hear others' reasoning.  Incidentally, even if we become 
sufficiently risk-accommodating to use V2.x, I would prefer to stay 
with Maildir because I don't really want to 'risk' 
transferring/recoding/reformatting all the email messages etc.  We 
need to avoid risks that are, simply, avoidable.

regards, Ron