From: Rocco Rutte Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:58:29 +0000 (+0200) Subject: For mailbox formats, add some more verbose pros and cons X-Git-Tag: neomutt-20160307~701^2~16 X-Git-Url: https://granicus.if.org/sourcecode?a=commitdiff_plain;h=1b535975c2e740a82b70e6e28976ef63fcf8321e;p=neomutt For mailbox formats, add some more verbose pros and cons --- diff --git a/doc/manual.xml.head b/doc/manual.xml.head index fdc3f5ece..e4fcca8f9 100644 --- a/doc/manual.xml.head +++ b/doc/manual.xml.head @@ -4964,14 +4964,16 @@ added to the prompt. Mailbox Formats -Mutt supports reading and writing of four different mailbox formats: +Mutt supports reading and writing of four different local mailbox formats: mbox, MMDF, MH and Maildir. The mailbox type is autodetected, so there is no need to use a flag for different mailbox types. When creating new -mailboxes, Mutt uses the default specified with the $mbox_type variable. +mailboxes, Mutt uses the default specified with the +$mbox_type variable. A +short description of the formats follows. -mbox. This is the most widely used mailbox format for UNIX. All +mbox. This is a widely used mailbox format for UNIX. All messages are stored in a single file. Each message has a line of the form: @@ -4981,32 +4983,50 @@ From me@cs.hmc.edu Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:44:56 PST to denote the start of a new message (this is often referred to as the -From_ line). +From_ line). The mbox format requires mailbox +locking, is prone to mailbox corruption with concurrently writing +clients or misinterpreted From_ lines. Depending on the +environment, new mail detection can be unreliable. Mbox folders are fast +to open and easy to archive. -MMDF. This is a variant of the mbox format. Each message is -surrounded by lines containing ˆAˆAˆAˆA (four control-A's). +MMDF. This is a variant of +the mbox format. Each message is surrounded by +lines containing ˆAˆAˆAˆA (four +control-A's). The same problems as for mbox apply (also with finding the +right message separator as four control-A's may appear in message +bodies). -MH. A radical departure from mbox and MMDF, a mailbox +MH. A radical departure from mbox and MMDF, a mailbox consists of a directory and each message is stored in a separate file. The filename indicates the message number (however, this is may not correspond to the message number Mutt displays). Deleted messages are renamed with a comma (,) prepended to the filename. Mutt detects this type of mailbox by looking for either .mh_sequences -or .xmhcache (needed to distinguish normal directories from MH -mailboxes). +or .xmhcache files (needed to distinguish normal directories from MH +mailboxes). MH is more robust with concurrent clients writing the mailbox, +but still may suffer from lost flags; message corruption is less likely +to occur than with mbox/mmdf. It's usually slower to open compared to +mbox/mmdf since many small files have to be read (Mutt provides + to greatly speed this process up). +Depending on the environment, MH is not very disk-space efficient. -Maildir. The newest of the mailbox formats, used by the Qmail MTA (a +Maildir. The newest of the mailbox formats, used by the Qmail MTA (a replacement for sendmail). Similar to MH, except that it adds three subdirectories of the mailbox: tmp, new and cur. Filenames for the messages are chosen in such a way they are unique, even when two programs are writing the mailbox over NFS, which means that no file locking -is needed. +is needed and corruption is very unlikely. Maildir maybe +slower to open without caching in Mutt, it too is not very +disk-space efficient depending on the environment. Since no additional +files are used for metadata (which is embedded in the message filenames) +and Maildir is locking-free, it's easy to sync across different machines +using file-level synchronization tools.