View Source: MBox - Waikato Linux Users Group

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A hideous MailBox storage format. It is very common on [Unix] machines.

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>.

[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.

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].

If you're in search of a usable MailBox format, take a look at MailDir.

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Last edited on Sunday, October 17, 2004 5:37:33 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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