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

[Michael Brian Bentley]

>	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

Ok. I'm not sure about the upsides. If I have 10GB of mail on the 
server, I'd expect that's where search operations would take place. 
Mail is mail, yeah, but if I have 10GB of it, I need to have the 
system deal with it on my behalf, and that includes providing 
management and data mining.