Re: using movemail directly in .emacs

[Robert Thorpe]

lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> writes:

> Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:
>> In general though storing lots of emails in a file isn't really a
>> problem.
>> [...]
>> Mbox files are very simple, it's hard to get writing to them
>> wrong.
>
> That goes only as long as everything works as intended.  Have a power
> failure or a yet-unnoticed disk failure, have your MUA crash due to some
> bug or because the system kills it because it`s out of memory, have your
> computer crash or freeze, have some issue with a network file system or
> other things that don`t come to mind atm --- and your whole file with
> all the mails may be gone.

MUAs and MTAs have been using mbox files for a long time, they take
precautions against this.  Rmail, for example, uses Emacs' default
backup file system.  For each file MBOX there's a MBOX~ that can be used
for recovery.  Other mailers do different things.  As I understand it,
MTAs only delete emails from their internal cache when the email has
been written to the users spool file.

I've never lost any email because of this type of problem.  (I have lost
it using Microsoft PST files though).

> Deal with a single (relatively small) file, and chances are that only
> this single file is affected.
>
>> You're right about flags though.  Mbox files aren't very portable
>> between mailers for that reason.  Another, bigger, problem is coding
>> systems.  Thunderbird (for example) treats mbox files as ASCII [1].  If
>> you get a UTF-8 email in Thunderbird then it inserts it as base64 (well
>> I assume it's base64) into the mbox.  On the other hand in Rmail seems to
>> inserts it as UTF-8.  Both work correctly but in their own way.
>
> Hm, so you need to somehow identify such base64 encoded files and decode
> them when searching ... that`s awkward.

I just use Thunderbird for those ones.  It's an issue though.  I may
recode those one day.

>> I'm not saying that it's best to use mbox files, but the problems with
>> them aren't large.  Large directory structures have other problems.
>
> Problems like?

It asks a lot of the filesystem.  Some filesystems can't handle long
path and some can't handle certain characters in filenames.  Some behave
quite slowly if a lot of directories are being checked.  The minimum
file size is quite large on many systems, so if you have lots of small
emails then it wastes a lot of space.  If I keep backup files that waste
more space, but I can always delete a few of them if file length is an
issue.  I can just copy a mbox file to a USB key, or download one from a
website (such as the GNU mailing list archives).


However, I don't think that Maildirs or MH are bad systems.  My mail
point here is that mbox files aren't bad either.  The whole debate is
about a few details that aren't really that important.

BR,
Robert Thorpe