Questions on nnmaildir

[Thomas Neumann <blacky_tn@gmx.de>]

hiya

little introduction: So far I used Gnus with nnimap-Backend to access a
courier-imap server on a different or the same box. [Reading mail from
2 hosts]. Today I came around fiddling with nnmaildir. I was attempting to
remove the courier-part when reading mail locally.

First surprise:
  Although courier and nnmaildir use Maildirs, they're not quite
  compatible with each other.


But that's not the reason, why I write this mail. It seems that
nnmaildir is quite an inode-hogger.

Let's suppose there is a maildir with 500 mails, 15 are ticked, 480 are
read, none 'new' or 'temporary'.

This results in:
  [..]/cur                     -> 500 files
  [..]/new                     ->  no files
  [..]/tmp                     ->  no files
  [..]/.nnmaildir/marks/read   -> 480 files
  [..]/.nnmaildir/marks/ticked ->  15 files
  [..]/.nnmaildir/nov          -> 500 files
  [..]/.nnmaildir/num          -> 500 files

Files in read, ticked and num are all 0 byte in size. 
Each nov files has a single line. [Some of my maildirs contain
mailinglists with up to 11K messages *shudder*]

Wouldn't it make more sense to handle the marks in a fashion close to
courier? [appending them to the filename] and generate a single
overview-file containg all novs?

Well I'm not convinced that I could hack nnmaildir to my liking. So
either someone else is so kind and takes a stab at it, or I better
forget having heard of nnmaildir.



I'm using this setup for nnmaildir:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(setq
 ;; Read mail with nnimap
 ;; The same for the other methods, kind of.
 gnus-secondary-select-methods 
 '([...]
   (nnmaildir "thomas"
	      (directory "~/Maildirs")
	      (create-directory "../nnmaildir")
	      (directory-files nnheader-directory-files-safe)
	      (get-new-mail t)
	      )
   [...]
   )
------------------------------------------------------------------------
'[...]' are omittet parts



tschüß
thomas