[GTALUG] POP3 vs IMAP

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 10:06:38PM -0400, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
> Lennart,
> 
>    I have been using Sylpheed and MH format since July 23, 2003.  At least, those are my earliest email files.  I have no complaints.  A separate file for each email makes it easier to use grep to search your email archives.  

maildir has one file per message too, but it does not go renaming files
to do operations.  It stays sane.  It stores mail.  It does not handle
sorting, tagging, or anything else.  It stores mail.  The only thing it
can flag that I know of is read vs unread vs new.  Looking at the spec
there are some more flags that can be added to the end of the filename,
but at least the main filename stays consistent.

maildir seems to be essentially MH done right.  In my opinion at least.
Hard to believe I consider something by DJB to be done right.  What is
the world coming to.

>    I recall liking the mbox format.  I had things set up so that I could launch pine, balsa or kmail, depending on my mood.  I found that Netscape would delete emails by setting a flag that the other email programs did not recognize. 

mbox is way too slow with all the messages in one file.  And much harder
to fix if something goes wrong.

-- 
Len Sorensen