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

[Chad Leigh]

On Oct 6, 2006, at 1:11 PM, Michael Brian Bentley wrote:

>> 	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.


Many imap servers support server side searches

Chad