Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists
Gordon Messmer
yinyang at eburg.com
Sat Dec 13 23:31:47 UTC 2003
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 at redfish kaboom]$ du Mail
> 329248 Mail/storage
> 1675579 Mail
> [kaboom at 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.
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