[CentOS] mbox files - can they be "compacted"?
Russell Miller
duskglow at gmail.com
Mon Apr 14 05:41:14 UTC 2014
On Apr 13, 2014, at 10:25 PM, Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
>
> In the context of the OP, when mutt tries to deal with a message (e.g.,
> deleting, moving to a folder), it can be boatloads faster, since
> handling the message works on a small file which contains just that
> message. Deleting a message from an mbox mailbox, for example, requires
> rewriting the entire changed mbox file to disk (minus the deleted message).
> Deleting a message from a Maildir mailbox is just removing one file from
> a directory.
HOWEVER. When a directory grows too large, the OS can take a long time to seek through the directory, which can cause its own set of problems. And this makes cleaning out a maildir directory selectively a real pain. Maildir really could do with a hashing mechanism.
--Russell
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