Re: Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Dax Kelson wrote:
>
> > MBOX would've have corrupted itself ten times over, turned the hard
> > drives into molten hunks, and gobbled up RAM by the buckets.
>
> Nonsense. 
>
> [kaboom redfish kaboom]$ du Mail
> 329248  Mail/storage
> 1675579 Mail
> [kaboom redfish kaboom]$
>
> that's my mbox format email directory. No gobbled RAM, no molten hard 
> drives, no corrupted mailboxes in ~8 years of reading email out of that 
> directory, no need for hyperbole.

OK, you haven't seen corruption.  I'd wager that's because the system is 
not a large, multi-user system and completes individual deliveries quickly.

In any case, your evidence is anecdotal, not proof.  It doesn't mirror 
my own experience.  I've moved two companies to Maildir style delivery. 
 Both were previously using Slackware/Linux 2.0/sendmail/procmail. 
This combination was not only corrupting mailboxes, but corrupting the 
entire file system that the spools were on. (Damn Linux 2.0... Damn it 
to hell)

The scalability problem with mbox is that any operation on the 
individual messages (deleting one, for instance) requires that the 
entire mbox be rebuilt.  That means if you have a 300MB spool and you 
delete a message, 300MB of data is read off the disk and then written 
back.  Get just a few hundred users doing this and you disk bandwidth is 
maxed out.

Because of that, I think that mbox is highly inappropriate for volume 
servers.

Single user desktops aren't such a big deal.  I can't think of any 
compelling advantage one way or the other.  Maildir certainly scales 
down better than mbox scales up, though.  It seems to me that the 
defaults should suit the largest group of users possible.  Defaulting to 
mbox only helps a minority of users who use very old software which 
doesn't support the Maildir format.  Those users certainly are going to 
know how to configure their systems to use mbox if they see advantages 
in it.  I think that defaulting to Maildir, but doing nothing to remove 
support for mbox, is clearly the best way to go.