Re: [Evolution] MailDir + unSYNC + Invalid Root on Evo 1.4.6

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

> Interesting.
>
> What if you have the situation of squirrelly email servers that
> is causing email to be days (1 to 14, in the case of some mailing
> lists) late.  Is it all just tacked on to the end of the mbox,
> with your index file keeping track of the order?
Yes.  Mbox - and infact IMAP even, only ever puts mail on the end of the mailbox.  Its a spool system really.  Its up to the client (or imap server can do it) sort by sent-date or whatever.

Mbox can be worse if you have more clients accessing the mail, which might delete mail inside the mailbox, but mail should only ever be appended (at least, thats how it works in practice).  For maildir the code actually has to sort the mails to get the delivery order - which it needs for camel's abstraction and so would any imap server using maildir to store things (maildir names have a timestamp/sequence number for this).

--

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> "born to die, live to work, it's all downhill from here" Novell's Evolution and Free Software Developer