[Dovecot] mbox vs maildir

Don Russell russell.don at gmail.com
Fri Jun 29 20:14:42 EEST 2007


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?

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

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.

Thank you


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