From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: lee Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: using movemail directly in .emacs Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 03:58:49 +0200 Organization: my virtual residence Message-ID: <8738fwnfs6.fsf@yun.yagibdah.de> References: <5383c311$0$61282$c3e8da3$5e5e430d@news.astraweb.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1401155966 1301 80.91.229.3 (27 May 2014 01:59:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 01:59:26 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue May 27 03:59:19 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fc-0001dY-Vg for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 27 May 2014 03:59:17 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:59347 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fc-0003rM-GJ for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 26 May 2014 21:59:16 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:40319) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fM-0003iK-Nj for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Mon, 26 May 2014 21:59:07 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fG-0002Yf-3F for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Mon, 26 May 2014 21:59:00 -0400 Original-Received: from client-194-42-186-216.muenet.net ([194.42.186.216]:52755 helo=yun.yagibdah.de) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fF-0002YY-Ri for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Mon, 26 May 2014 21:58:54 -0400 Original-Received: from lee by yun.yagibdah.de with local (Exim 4.80.1) (envelope-from ) id 1Wp6fE-00056A-R4 for help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org; Tue, 27 May 2014 03:58:52 +0200 User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4.50 (gnu/linux) Mail-Followup-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-Received-From: 194.42.186.216 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:97896 Archived-At: Hikaru Ichijyo writes: >> The problem here isn't that spool files are an anarchonism, it's that >> they're not made for storing large amounts of mail. > > It seems like most users let gigabytes of mail accumulate in their > inbox. Most of the mail here is from mailing lists. It never gets into the inbox because gnus splits it. Do you seriously want to store over 120k mails from a mailing list in a single (mbox) file? Rewrite the whole file *every time* you flag a message as "read" or "answered"? > The only messages I leave in mine are active items that still > need attention. Everything else gets moved to a folder as soon as > possible. I never have more than 400 messages in my inbox at its worst. The anachronism is storing many emails in one file. That was done in the past because file systems were used the performance of which would be severely impacted when you had many files in the same directory. Without this limitation, it doesn`t make sense to put many emails into a single file, even if it`s only 10 or 5, other than for special purposes. It is a bad idea to do that because the single file is prone to locking problems and corruption, and it can easily become unwieldy and very slow to work with. Using a number of single files ("folders") doesn`t really make it better. IIRC, maildir supports flags (like read, answered) in the file names, with, besides efficiency, the advantage that every MUA which supports maildir can understand the flags. When you use mbox, you either have to use some sort of index file to store the flags, or you need to re-write the whole file when a flag changes, and each MUA may use their own way for this, not understood by others. How efficient is that? Using mbox is as much an anachronism as using a spool file for storing email: It`s still a single file. > Granted, we now store the central user databases in some kind of > directory on a central server with something like LDAP rather than > having a humongous /etc/passwd, but I work in academic computing, and > universities are where big multiuser UNIX-based Internet sites have deep > roots, not likely to go away any time soon. They are not using IMAP on top of maildir, or cyrus? Do they make the users` spool files available over the network? -- Knowledge is volatile and fluid. Software is power.