Mbox
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| − | The traditional unixlike system's email storage format; pioneered by the ubiquitous (and somewhat evil) [[sendmail]]. An '''mbox''' is a single flat file containing all of a user's emails, | + | The traditional unixlike system's email storage format; pioneered by the ubiquitous (and somewhat evil) [[sendmail]]. An '''mbox''' is a single flat file containing all of a user's emails, concatenated front to back. |
Mboxes are faster to read from (but slower to write to) than [[maildir|maildirs]]. More importantly, they are considerably more subject to potential corruption issues - on a heavily trafficked server, file locking has to be carefully implemented to keep multiple processes from clobbering a single mbox they all want to write to. Worse yet, a single corrupt file can result in losing ALL of a user's email; whereas with [[maildir]] there is no simple way (short of somebody typing '''rm -rf''' from a shell prompt) to lose more than one email with a single operation or corruption. | Mboxes are faster to read from (but slower to write to) than [[maildir|maildirs]]. More importantly, they are considerably more subject to potential corruption issues - on a heavily trafficked server, file locking has to be carefully implemented to keep multiple processes from clobbering a single mbox they all want to write to. Worse yet, a single corrupt file can result in losing ALL of a user's email; whereas with [[maildir]] there is no simple way (short of somebody typing '''rm -rf''' from a shell prompt) to lose more than one email with a single operation or corruption. | ||
Revision as of 08:28, 15 September 2004
The traditional unixlike system's email storage format; pioneered by the ubiquitous (and somewhat evil) sendmail. An mbox is a single flat file containing all of a user's emails, concatenated front to back.
Mboxes are faster to read from (but slower to write to) than maildirs. More importantly, they are considerably more subject to potential corruption issues - on a heavily trafficked server, file locking has to be carefully implemented to keep multiple processes from clobbering a single mbox they all want to write to. Worse yet, a single corrupt file can result in losing ALL of a user's email; whereas with maildir there is no simple way (short of somebody typing rm -rf from a shell prompt) to lose more than one email with a single operation or corruption.
Contrast with maildir.
