Re: [9front] maildir history

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Kurt H Maier wrote in
 <YB8cQCDKe/3SDEka@wopr>:
 |On Sat, Feb 06, 2021 at 11:25:12PM +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Which means re-encoding as necessary to avoid ^From_ quoting,
 |> which not many do support (my s-nail for example does not :).
 |
 |No, on Plan 9 it still sucks, because you're writing a whole new version
 |of the file every single time you add or delete a message from an mbox
 |store.  This has consequences for big churny mailstores, and they fill

That can be optimized.  For POSIX mailx with "append" set, and if
i recall correctly, my s-nail correctly extends this via
appending.  Removal, ok.

 |up disks fast.  mbox is better with MIME encoding but it still
 |irreparably sucks as a storage format even when you ignore parsing
 |problems.  I hate it and I want it to die.

I seem to recall even dovecot was going away from it, though if
you control a file and have an external info aka index file or
structure, just like git has for its database, no modifications
actually occur but setting a flag or two, with occasional cleanup
by writing a new version top down.  Well.  I once read on
a FreeBSD list about an administrator saying "my boss as a mailbox
with millions of files, it is no fun.  We use archeopterix to
index it" (at least in spirit, been a few years).  Like so maildir
is a problem, too.  Need a db with index to make that acceptable,
wasn't it Zawinski who talked in the 90s, for Netscape....

  https://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

There you go, 1998:

  Right now I'm looking at a folder in 3.0. It has 15,466 messages
  in it. Selecting this folder takes less than a second (it's hard
  to eyeball it, but I'd say it takes about 1/2 to 3/4 second from
  when I click to when I see the message summary on the
  screen). The BSD mbox file is 57.2MB (1.2 million lines) and the
  summary file is 1.3MB (2% of the size of the folder.)

  This is on a P266 with a local IDE disk (Linux.) 

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)