On 03 Mar 2021, at 05:33, Yassine Chaouche <a.chaouche@algerian-radio.dz> wrote:
>> Am I missing some reason I would need/want to keep track of that specific login time separately?
> What about mbox files ?
Is anyone foolish enough to use mbox in 2021?
It's designed for dozens of kilobytes of mail. Perhaps hundreds of kilobytes/ It is a horrible horrible format for hundreds of megabyte of mail, it offers no advantages at all, and is fragile to corruption since it stores everything in a single file.
Specific to the 'why use last login' question, with millions of mailboxes, walking the filesystem is more than a little onerous (having done it many times over the years, and never remembering where I put the script from 'last time') and takes a good chunk of a day to run. We were doing file-based last-login for a while (yeah, still needs a fs walk, but at least is dead simple and requires no stat()'ing), till locking became an issue (nfs). We moved to redis a couple of months ago, and now determining things like "who hasn't logged into anything in 30 days" becomes a 1 minute run of a python script using redis SCAN.
If you don't have a mountain of mailboxes and fs-walking isn't a problem, then there's def less need. Which means you don't have management repeatedly asking for 'active mailboxes' ;)