suggestion need to design an email system.

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 21:12 -0700, David Lang wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Wesley Craig wrote:
> > On 17 Sep 2008, at 11:40, Jens Hoffrichter wrote:
> >> Why does cyrus need it's own
> >> structure for the mailboxes, which is similar, but not wholly
> >> compatible, to maildir. Maildir and cyrus both suffer from the same
> >> disadvantages (huge needs in terms of inodes etc.), yet I see no
> >> distinctive advantage for the cyrus mailbox format to maildir.
> > Performance.  I could go on & on, but that's the answer, basically.
> actually, I suspect that Cyrus existed before Maildir and since Cyrus is a 
> 'black box' server there's no advantage to moving to maildir.
> Also Cyrus has cache, index, and flags stored seperatly from the message itself, 
> which means that when these things are changed the message file itself doesn't 
> need to change.

Yep,  which is why the sealed mailstore is a good idea: meta-data.  You
can keep reliable meta-data if third parties can go in and muck about.

> doign a quick google check on maildir it also appears that maildir is not as 
> standard as people think it is, it's defined almost entirely by the 
> implementation (DJB started it, but never worked to turn it into a standard for 
> others to use)