From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: Is Qmail some kind of joke? Date: 1999/06/07 Message-ID: #1/1 References: <7jco8i$krd$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8ghfokanqn.fsf@galapagos.cse.psu.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu X-Trace: nntp6.u.washington.edu 928744097 25120 (None) 140.142.17.40 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.mail.imap NNTP-Posting-User: foo On 6 Jun 1999, Scott Schwartz wrote: > That's because the UW IMAP authors don't want you to use Maildir, for > reasons which are obscure. Because Maildir has dreadful performance (worse than any supported mailbox format) and doesn't scale, that's why. There are other technical (and non-technical) reasons as well; but performance so wretched that you wouldn't want to use it for a mailbox with more than a handful of messages is enough. Third-party Maildir drivers are available; however if you use them it is strictly at your own risk (don't even think about sending in bug reports or complaining about it being slow). I doubt that you'll find the Cyrus guys any more willing to consider supporting Maildir. They're probably even less willing than we are, especially since it would make Cyrus slower than our server. The recommended mailbox format in the UW IMAP toolkit is mbx, which is much faster than the standard UNIX mailbox format and allows shared read/write access. In the future, we are looking into databases for very high performance mailbox formats. Cyrus is halfway to being a database; it is not strictly a one-file/one-message format since it uses an auxillary index that (among other things) contains preparsed ENVELOPEs and BODYSTRUCTUREs. That's where Cyrus gets a lot of its performance benefit. -- Mark -- * RCW 19.190 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. * * Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message. * Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.