Re: [SLUG] Converting mbox to maildir on Debian

["Andrew Reilly" <areilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 02:46:18AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> I'm interested in giving maildirs a go now, just to see what they're like,
> etc. However, given that I'm a sucker for the Debian way, I can't just
> install qmail willy-nilly, and my first guess is that the 'maildir' utility
> comes with it.

Not sure how the Debian way interacts with qmail, so I'll leave
that, but:

> So, what's the most direct way for me to convert my rather extensive tree of
> mbox files into Maildirs?

Do you really want to do that?  The big, wonderful bennefit of
Maildirs is that they're immune to corruption in the face of
multiple asynchronous accesses (such as mail delivery while the
MUA is modifying the mailbox) without the use of explicit locks.
This means that they're about the only thing that works safely
in an NFS situation, but they're useful otherwise too.

That explains why they're good for incoming mailboxes (including
all of the ones that your filters split your list mail into),
but doesn't really relate to your mbox archives.  Mbox archives
are only ever tweaked by your MUA, under your control so the
asynchronous access argument is not as useful.  Sure, you can
get confused, and have multiple mailers open at once, but it
is pretty hard to cause yourself grief that way.  The downside
for maildirs is that (like mh archives) every message occupies
an inode, and requires multiple file system operations to access
it.  So you waste space on disk, and time when opening the
mailbox.  (Mbox files can often be mmapped or otherwise read into
memory in one hit.)

Having said that, the IMAP daemon I'm playing with at the
moment, (Courier-IMAP) only deals with maildirs, so I'm thinking
about burning another 20000 inodes to see how it goes...

-- 
Andrew