[GTALUG] mbox vs Maildir [was Re: Linux friendly email providers?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Ron / BCLUG via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I've seen mbox files get corrupted (all mailbox
| messages in one file, and a line like "From: " is the message delimiter.
| Terrible!)

I don't remember seeing that corruption in the last few decades of using 
mbox. The horrors of in-band signalling are well known -- maybe the 
software I use reflects that knowledge.

| I've recently switched to using Maildir format (server *and* Thunderbird).
| One message per file.

You mentioned that you were running out of space on your system.  If a lot 
of that space is mail messages, I would bet that Maildir is costing you a 
lot of it.  Each message is taking a multiple of the allocation unit size 
(1KB? 4KB?) and a large part of that is likely unused (the tail of the 
last unit).

My intuition would be that since mail messages are usually short, and the 
distribution of sizes isn't uniform, you are probably using at least 25% 
more disk space with Maildir.

But intuition is surprisingly bad for computer things.  With Thunderbird 
conversions, you could easily measure this for a real-world example