"The Great Debate" - POP vs IMAP (fork of Mail Problems)

[Karl Kuehn]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 5:27 PM, Michael Brian Bentley wrote:

> Typical IMAP servers don't store the data in anything more  
> sophisticated than files, several thousand messages to a file. IMAP  
> access to individual messages is still pokey. Dataset operations  
> over IMAP aren't much of an improvement over the same operations  
> performed locally by POP clients.

	Actually, there are three main formats in the the *nix mailservers:  
mbox, mbx (faster version of mbox), and maildir. Maildir keeps each  
record (email) in a separate file, so accessing individual files can  
happen without touching other messages. Since searching is usually  
done on the client side, there are really not many big down sides. As  
an example Courier-MTA uses maildir by default.
	Assuming that your filesystem can handle a lot of small files well,  
maildir usually has a performance benefit, especially when you have  
multiple clients using the same mailbox.

--
		Karl Kuehn
			larkost at softhome.net