Re: [Evolution] Mailbox formats

[Nigel Metheringham <Nigel Metheringham dev InTechnology co uk>]

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 19:31, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> --On Tuesday, October 29, 2002 2:48 PM +0000 Nigel Metheringham
> <Nigel Metheringham dev InTechnology co uk> wrote:
>
> > Not very compressible - too little plaintext to let
> > algorithms loose on plus compressing smaller than basic block size gains
> > nothing.
>
> Are you sure? Or is that only when compressing individual messages? 

That is for message at a time compression - or hooking zlib into your
fopen.  Obviously building them into a single file (tar/cpio) and
compressing them would be fine, zip might work less well.

> I'd also like to point out mbx format, the format promoted by the UW-IMAP
> people. It's a many-messages-per-file format but it's designed for update.
> As it's a binary format, it can't be easily hand-edited, and the use of
> c-client library functions for maintenance is preferred. (I'm still using
> mbox, so this is my regurgitation of what I remember from a visit to the
> UW-IMAP site.)

Its a relatively obscure format, although I believe the big Oxford
University mail system was implemented on MBX (using exim for delivery -
they contributed the MBX code as I recall).

        Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel Metheringham InTechnology co uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]