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Re: Definition of "folder"

1998-09-28 15:56:59
Bennett Todd suggested for Era Eriksson's description of folders,

|"A folder is a data structure for holding email messages. There are many
| different mail folder formats. One widely-used format is called "mbox"
| format; this is a single file, containing one or more messages
| concatenated; each message begins with a line starting "From "

... and ends with two newlines.

| Another
| popular folder format is MH, in which the folder is a directory, and each
| message is a separate file; the filenames are the message numbers. Another
| popular folder format is Maildir; a Maildir folder is a directory, with
| three subdirectories named "tmp", "new", and "cur". Messages are written
| into "tmp", then moved to "new" to commit the delivery. As messages are
| read, they're moved from "new" to "cur", and renamed to append flags for
| the message status. In Maildir folders the files have long, complex names
| intended to ensure that all filenames are unique. Maildir is the only mail
| folder format that requires no locking."

The last statement is incorrect.  Deliveries to ordinary directories or to
MH-style directories do not require locking either, because procmail picks a
unique filename for each message. 

Era had asked,

| > (Somewhere in the FAQ, I would like to have instructions for figuring out
| > your MX host(s), too.)

Bennett replied,

| For modern Unixes:
| 
|       host -t mx `hostname`
| 
| For older ones:
| 
|       (echo set q=mx;hostname)|nslookup

  nslookup -q=mx `hostname`

should do the job.

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