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[Brad Knowles]

At 9:34 PM -0500 9/27/06, Brad Knowles wrote:

>  Moreover, I'm not keen on Maildir.  It makes a lot of trade-offs to
>  try to get something that is NFS-safe, and I'm not convinced those
>  trade-offs are worthwhile, especially not in a non-NFS environment.

One other problem with Maildir -- it throws all message files into 
the same directory, and doesn't use a hashed directory scheme.  If 
we're going to do directory hashing, I would think we'd want to do it 
within our mailbox storage mechanism as well as elsewhere in the 
queueing system.

>  In his paper regarding what they built for the Earthlinnk mail
>  system, Nick Christenson has clearly proven that you can use the
>  atomic creat() system call in a way that eliminates the need for file
>  locking on NFS, without all the various baggage that Maildir brings
>  to the table.

If you want to read Nick's paper, go to 
<http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/doc/mail_arch.html>.  Note that he's also 
the author of the book _sendmail Performance Tuning_, see 
<http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/book/sendmail/>.

>  Mark Crispin also has a lot of good things to say about the
>  weaknesses inherent in Maildir.  You should read his comments, too.

Mark's comments can be read at 
<http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/formats.txt.html>.  Do 
a "find" on the page for "maildir", and read from there.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.