getmail question... What is a "Maildir" supposed to be???

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:43:34AM -0400, Andrew Hammond wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Maildir's have more structure to them than just a simple directory.
> IIRC, there are files listing seen and unseen mail. I remember there
> were a couple of ways to initialize them. I bet that you could find them
> with a google search.

A maildir is a directory containing 3 directories: tmp, new and cur.

All new mail is written to tmp, then moved to new (since a mv within a
filesystem is atomic there is no lock needed to solve race conditions).
The mail reader then moves messages from new to cur and adds stuff to
the end of the filename to flag read/unread and other bits of
information in a standard format supported by Maildir aware clients.

maildirmake is a common script for setting up such a Maildir.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml