Re: [Evolution] POP3 mbox performance and auto-expunging?

[Internaut at Large <dkap mailhost haven org>]

On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 18:41 -0400, Jeff wrote:

> > With a mbox file, on an ext2/3 file system, the system doesn't seem
> > to
> > be able to deal with the file as a mail-type file.  It works
> > perfectly
> > well as a data or source file, until you try to read it with a mail
> > program (mutt, mailx, evolution, thunderbird)
> What do you mean, on ext3 a "mbox" format mailbox won't be able to be
> dealt with, or is that it can't deal with maildir, or...? 

maildir setup puts each message in it's own file, so if you have 300
mail messages, there are 300 (or 600, depending on the design) files in
the maildir directory, whereas with the mbox format, they are all (all
300 of them) in the same file.  Which means, that, to be sure that you
don't cause corruption, when you delete files, a copy of the mbox file
with the pieces deleted from it is made, before deleting the original
one, so that if you have large mbox files, and not a lot of free disk
space, you might run into problems, but I don't get that that is your
issue.

If you create a mbox file, in excess of 2 gig on a linux box (at least
under Fedora, and SUSE, I've not tested it under Ubuntu) and try to use
it as a mail file, you get a very interesting error message, much along
the lines of "the file system cannot deal with that large of a file of
that file type" but you can still do things like "cat" to it.  Hence the
suggestion of formail and procmail connected to move it into a maildir
format.

There are other issues with the evolution implementation of maildir, but
mutt works fine across them, so I use evolution to read, thread, and
filter/search folder my mail, and then, when I've marked things for
deletion, I go to mutt to expunge them.  That seems to work.

Good luck with getting your aunt's conversion to go smoothly.

-dkap