Don Russell wrote:
I'm using Dovecot 1.0.1-12 on Linux/Fedora 7 along with sendmail and procmail all running on the same box mail is stored in mbox format
It's a small system with a half dozen or so e-mail "accounts". Each with 40-60MB of messages in various folders.
I keep seeing messages about how mbox is antiquated and anybody with more than 100 messages etc should not use mbox, but use maildir instead.
I'm not entirely convinced.... there seem to be pros and cons for each. Is there a discussion somewhere that really highlights why one format is so much better than the other?
One factor not often discussed: When I switched from mbox to maildir the size of incremental backups went down to a fraction of its previous size (only the new messages are backed up, not the entire mailbox). It allowed me to do incremental backups to disk instead of tape, which I still use for full backups.
P.S. consider maildrop instead of procmail if you switch to maildir. See info in the dovecot wiki.
Mark