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 somewhat 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. |
Contrast with [[maildir]]. | Contrast with [[maildir]]. | ||
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| + | See also [[Postfix]], an alternative mail server, that offers mbox capability. | ||
[[Category:FreeBSD Terminology]] | [[Category:FreeBSD Terminology]] | ||
Latest revision as of 16:37, 2 October 2007
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 somewhat 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.
See also Postfix, an alternative mail server, that offers mbox capability.
