Re: [9front] maildir history

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

or we just store mail in the cloud, then we will not be allowed to
make an index, we will not be allowed to seek and we need one GET
request and 9 captchas for accessing one single mail.

what is so off-putting about ordering data in files?

On 2/7/21, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> 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)
>