Linux Desktop Hacks

Convert Your Mailbox #59

Chapter 8, Desktop Programs

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189

HACK

also decide to switch between the two based purely on technical merits, so

here is a brief rundown of the differences.

mbox Versus maildir

mbox is the older of the two mail storage formats. It is actually the generic

name for a family of related formats. Although the formats are slightly differ-

ent, they both store multiple messages within a single file. These multiple

formats came about because of different Mail User Agents (MUAs) imple-

menting their own variations of the original format. Although they are very

similar, they are generally not compatible between MUAs. Because of the

single file format, there can be problems with file-locking and storage on

networked filesystems such as NFS, which might cause the mail file to be

corrupted.

maildir, on the other hand, stores one message per file. This removes the

locking problems of mbox, which means it should be your first choice is

your mail is stored over NFS. Because of its relative youth compared to some

of the MUAs that support it, there are no variants of the format, so your

mail should be portable between clients.

Generally, maildir is considered to be superior to mbox.

Converting mbox to maildir

You can convert between the two formats with the mb2md.pl Perl script,

which you can find at http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md. To use

this tool, you need to have both Perl