[OS X TeX] OT: Choice between Panther and Tiger

[mark oilcan]

--- Aaron Jackson <jackson at msrce.howard.edu> wrote:

> On May 8, 2005, at 3:59 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> 
> > .emlx files, one per message. The new organisation of a mailbox
> > will 
> > be, for example:
> >
> > OS X TeX.mbox:
> >     Info.plist
> >     Messages
> >         15752.emlx
> >         15753.emlx
> >         ...
> >     content_index
> >     mbox
> >     mbox.SKindex
> >     mbox.SKindex.isValid
> >     table_of_contents
> >

> >
> > This means that it won't be possible to easily import your
> > mailboxes 
> > in Mozilla or Thunderbird say, should you consider later to switch 
> > emailer or change platform.
> 
> I haven't gone through this myself, as I haven't yet got Tiger, but
> it 
> sounds like you are describing maildir format.  See 
> http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html for more info.  If so,
> then 
> this is very much a standard and there are many conversion utilities 
> available to switch between mbox and maildir format.  The benefit of 
> maildir over mbox is that messages are individual files.  Instead of 
> parsing through on 500MB file you look through a directory with many 
> smaller files.  Theoretically, this has a smaller memory requirement 
> for the mail application.
> 

I don't have Tiger either, so it would be informative if someone who
does can verify this, but this mail format, quite unfortunately,
actually does NOT sound like maildir format. A maildir mailbox contains
three subdirectories: cur, new, tmp with individual messages stored in
cur. Also the names of the files which contain these messages must
follow a specific form. This insures interoperability with different
mail clients. It sure would have been nice if Apple had used a standard
like maildir instead of inventing one of their own.

MarkA


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