On Thu, 14 Oct 1999, George Kahler wrote:
Yah, we still run sendmail and our inboxes are in the old Unix style format (one file per user, multiple messages per file). I heard some of you mention Maildir and I also came across information on mbx format.
We will use some kind of "maildir" format with one message per file. The reasoning behind it is that many messages will fit within one to several blocks and thus only a couple NFS reads or writes. Each time a mesages is deleted we unlink a file. This conserves diskspace as only the deleted message will be left in any snapshots rather than a copy of the entire old mailbox. Also, unlinking is a relatively inexpensive operation in contrast to reading and writing the entire spool file via the network. Less data to move around means faster performace or the same performance for more people.
Tom