On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 09:21:46AM +1000, Gregory Bond wrote:
Chris Green wrote:
Thus a folder called 'holidays' is actually a directory called 'INBOX.holidays' and a folder called 'holidays/france' is a directory called 'INBOX.holidays.france'. Why any sort of mail server would want to construct a folder hierarchy like this I can never understand.
IMAP pretty much requires that you can find all the folder names pretty quickly. Having folders stored like this means you can find all folders with a single directory scan, without having to walk a whole filesystem tree.
Hey, that's the first reasonably good reason I've come across for doing it like this. However it's only a reason for IMAP plus maildir to do it, not a generic maildir reason. I suppose it's again down to the conflict between the requirements for a big dedicated multi-user mail system (where the above may well be significant) and a small single user or SoHo system (where the above will be totally irrelevant).
-- Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."