On 01/04/2011 06:14 AM, Adam Tauno Williams wrote: > On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 15:06 +0100, Dominik Zyla wrote: >> Many people care about storage format. > And they are misguided in doing so. Details of message storage is an > internal [server's] problem. > No. They are being eminently practical. mbox format's 'one big file' approach results in significant I/O overhead for update operations, locking complexity (file locks on shared network storage - 'nuff said) and bloat in differential backups. I have literally tens of gigabytes of email stored on our servers. mbox storage would make backups slower, take significantly more backup storage space and add quite a lot of disk I/O for routine mailbox use as well as slow down email for the end users. It is also more prone to 'one error took out everything' problems. The idea that "low level/internal details don't matter" is only true when you are so far from your resource limits that they are effectively infinite. The real world often isn't that way. -- Benjamin Franz