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Annotated edit history of MailDir version 6, including all changes. View license author blame.
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4 AristotlePagaltzis 1 A robust MailBox format for [Unix] that gets around a lot of the serious limitations on the old and creaking [MBox] format.
1 PerryLorier 2
4 AristotlePagaltzis 3 Like [MH], it stores each [Email] in a file of its own, but does not require any locking, ever. This avoids many problems with concurrent updates, such as that some programs use flock(2) while others use fcntl(2), or that [NFS] FileSystem~s may not even support locking, or make too few guarantees about it. To that end, MailDir imposes more complex naming and structural requirements than [MH].
3 JohnMcPherson 4
4 AristotlePagaltzis 5 Rather than storing the files in a single directory, a MailDir MailBox uses three subdirectories: <tt>tmp</tt>, <tt>new</tt> and <tt>cur</tt>. <tt>tmp</tt> is a spool directory for new mail, used to ensure reliable delivery. Delivered, unread mail goes into the <tt>new</tt> subdirectory. As messages are read, they are moved into <tt>cur</tt>.
3 JohnMcPherson 6
4 AristotlePagaltzis 7 MailDir message naming conventions are defined so that message names are unique across shared filesystems, which means you don't get the normal set of file locking issues using most other formats. Some message flags and, depending on software, other MetaData, is encoded into the filename as well, to avoid the need to open every file all the time.
3 JohnMcPherson 8
4 AristotlePagaltzis 9 MailDir variants are used by Cyrus and courier [IMAP] daemons. Other [MTA]s have MailDir support, such as [Exim] and [Postfix]. The procmail(1) [MDA] also supports it, as do many MailClient~s such as [Mutt] and [Evolution].
2 StephenLewis 10
6 MattBrown 11 See also:
5 AristotlePagaltzis 12 * [http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html]
4 AristotlePagaltzis 13 * [http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html]
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