Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Dax Kelson]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 16:43, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Ronny Buchmann wrote:
> 
> > If MDA and MUA try to access it at the same time, you run into problems when 
> > they don't agree on a locking scheme or when using NFS.
> > 
> > Maildirs don't need locking.
> 
> Not true. That's why what passes for the Maildir standard was revised 
> earlier this year, after people found out the hard way that the "locking 
> not needed" hype was losing their email....

Don't mix the "standard" with a bug in the implementation. The standard
was absolutely not revised.

Modulo any implementation bugs, MBOX is still the worst email storage
format of all time. The standard -- the design -- is horrible.

Just on the point of scalability of MBOX vs Maildir, 

Not that I'm proud of it, but I have 3.8GB of email folders with 286,875
messages. My inbox alone is 300MB. :)

The Maildir/ format handles this without skipping a beat. Searches,
changes, and deletions are instantaneous. No locks and all problems they
bring.

After having my email client (Evo 1.4) open for hours reading through
multiple folders, and checking for new messages every 10 minutes, my
IMAP server (courier-imap) is using 7MB of memory.

This is very compelling!

MBOX would've have corrupted itself ten times over, turned the hard
drives into molten hunks, and gobbled up RAM by the buckets.

Dax Kelson