On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Matthias Andree wrote:
No-one's supposed to use mbox. Optimize as much as you want, it just doesn't scale at all. mbox is fine as long as you don't want to delete messages. It's perfect for read-only mailing list archives. Unless you run incremental backups with systems such as IBM/Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager that save complete files. Switching from mbox to Maildir has a *major* effect on the nightly backup data volume. With many users or users with big mboxes, or even with read-only
Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi writes: list archives that include "current month", it's just prohibitively expensive. I'd let my sister use it on her computer, but not in serious production -- I'd use NNTP to offer read-only archives rather than IMAP, but that's a personal preference.
I totally disagree with you here. What is lost with backups is gained in overall load on your system.
I know for a _fact_ (my own personal experience) that there are large free email providers that use Maildir for this very purpose.
Andy
-- Andreas Aardal Hanssen