Annotated edit history of
MBox version 1, including all changes.
View license author blame.
| Rev |
Author |
# |
Line |
| 1 |
AristotlePagaltzis |
1 |
A hideous MailBox storage format. It is very common on [Unix] machines. |
| |
|
2 |
|
| |
|
3 |
It is simply a FlatFile containing all [Email]s. A blank line followed by a line starting with <tt>From </tt> (ie <tt>"\n\nFrom "</tt>) is considered to mark the start of the next [Email]. Of course, this means that [Email]s containing a line that starts with <tt>From </tt> have to be mangled -- the convention is to prepend a greater-than sign, making it <tt>>From </tt>. |
| |
|
4 |
|
| |
|
5 |
[MBox]es do not scale. The entire file must be read sequentially in order to retrieve all messages, because there is no indicator to let a program skip over message bodies as it reads across the file. Many programs, such as the [PINE] MailClient, take the easy way out, and simply slurp the entire file into memory to break it down. If the [MBox] grows larger than your memory, you're going to be waiting for a while. |
| |
|
6 |
|
| |
|
7 |
In an attempt to address this problem of the [BSD] [MBox] format, the [MBox] under [Solaris] contains a subtle addition in the form of a <tt>Content-Length</tt> header. Unfortunately, [this only makes things worse | http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html]. |
| |
|
8 |
|
| |
|
9 |
If you're in search of a usable MailBox format, take a look at MailDir. |
