Q: Mailbox format

[S P Arif Sahari Wibowo]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/formats.txt.html
>
>Deleting a single message in mailbox format takes longer than maildir
>usually, since you have to rewrite at least part of a large file, vs
>just unlinking a file.

That's probably why in IMAP, we tag messages to be deleted before actually
delete them (expunge) in group (several messages at once).

>If you have email with large attachments, it is much faster to open and
>read a the header of each file than it is to read past each attachment.

In mbx format, there is a pointer to jump over messages quickly.

>If you have mainly small emails, then mailbox format is faster due to
>open/close overhead.  It's a tradeoff really.  Perhaps a better format
>would be some kind of database which can have just one large file, but
>have the indexing to help it jump to headers and such.  Could even make
>searching faster by indexing each header field and such.

The article said in the end about using database as mailboxes.

Is there any development on mail library -- and consequentially IMAP
server, POP server, etc. -- that use database engine as it backend?

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                               Stephan Paul Arif Sahari Wibowo
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