The only problem is that Maildir is a home directory based format,
where I am using Cyrus imapd, which keeps all mail in a central
partition, making it easy to backup all users' mail in one fell swoop.
Cyrus uses a format that sounds a little like Maildir. On the few
occasions I snooped through the repository, I saw that mail was kept
in a folder hierarchy that was fairly intuitive. It also keeps each
message in a separate file with a unique filename. Looks like an
incremented index, each new message gets a numerical filename that is
incremented by 1 from the previous message. Moving between folders
results in renaming the file as appropriate for the new folder.
Folders are directories with more recognizable names. The main thing,
though is that the mail is kept separate from users that might be just
smart enough to hurt themselves :)
Anyway, I wonder if I should add another list to my stack? I am
running an older version of Cyrus, but maybe the Cyrus list can tell
me what to do?
Thanks for your patience Igor!
Lou
On 06/15/01 10:10 PM, Igor Pruchanskiy sat at the `puter and typed:
. . .
Yes Maildir is a mailbox format. The difference between mbox and Maildir
that mbox stores mail in one big, basically text file, while Maildir keeps
each message in a separate file. Maildir was first introduced by qmail as a
native mailbox format, but procmail made it possible to use Maildir even
if you are using some other MTA, such as sendmail, postfix or exim. I am a
big sendmail fan but Maildir looks too damn attractive. The advantage of
Maildir is that it is NFS safe. My $HOME at work is NFS mounted and i
learned a lesson when NFS share went down and my mbox file with over 4,000
messages got hosed. However, disadvantage of Maildir is that if you run it
on a system with few hundred users your box can run out of inodes, which
is pretty minor and rarely happens.
The structure of Maildir is pretty weird and takes couple of days to get
used to.
$HOME/Maildir has
cur/
new/
tmp/
Um... here....
http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html
Enjoy.
P.S. There is a script called mbox2maildir on qmail.org that will convert
your mail into Maildir. Mutt has built in Maildir support. However BACKUP
YOUR MAIL first, because mbox2maildir MOVES all mail from mbox to Maildir
and you end up with no mbox...
igor
--
Louis LeBlanc
Fully Funded Hobbyist, KeySlapper Extrordinaire :)
leblanc(_at_)acadia(_dot_)ne(_dot_)mediaone(_dot_)net
http://acadia.ne.mediaone.net Ô¿Ô¬
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