[Dovecot] mbox vs maildir

[mouss]

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?

mbox is broken by design. Look at the next line.
 From what I can tell, mbox will convert the first word of this line to 
">From".
This means the message is modified, which is ok for raw text, but is not 
ok for structure text such as TeX or XML.

I've also had to edit mbox files with via to remove garbage, probably 
caused by lock issues.

Regarding performances: while a single file should be faster to parse 
than loading N files, how about:
- moving messages between folders (including folders for different accounts)
- rsync-like backup is simple and fast with maildir
- using messages to retrain a spam filter ("mv" is all that is needed!).

>
> The last time I tried to convert from mbox to maildir, things got 
> pretty botched up, no data loss, but it wasn't pretty. :-)

just because you got it wrong doesn't make it's hard. you probably 
didn't take enough time to get it right.
>
> Can Dovecot handle mbox for some users and maildir for others? I'd 
> like to try a conversion for one user... I'll probably create a new 
> user, then have procmail copy (via ! action code) all mail for one 
> user to that new user.

Why not use one of the available mbox 2 maildir utilities.