[Ti] Mail.app - whaddyawant?

[Chris Olson]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003, at 09:54 PM, Michael Bigley wrote:

>> I got 14 different mailboxes, one with 2507 messages and 137MB. Three 
>> more have over 2000 messages and over 100 MB in each.  My sent folder 
>> has 2765 messages and 155 MB.  Mail works fine for me - never 
>> crashes, has never corrupted a mailbox, never even given a hint of 
>> any problem.
>
> To address those posting their huge numbers of mail received, etc.: 
> this does not necessarily qualify a mail program for power users... 
> obviously the features that have been mentioned in reply to this 
> thread are required even if only a few messages are received (though 
> that is not usually the case). But for comparative purposes, Eudora 
> saves mail as text, so my mail folder is "only" 90mb; however, that is 
> sorted out into hundreds of mailboxes nested as deep as 5 layers in 
> some cases and containing over 12,000 email messages.

AppleMail saves mail as plain text also, stored in the standard Unix 
mbox format.  You can't see it with Finder, but if you start up the 
Terminal and cd ~/Library/Mail/<account_name>/INBOX.mbox then do 'ls 
-la' you'll find the mbox file.  You can open it with vi and look it 
over or edit it if you have one that gets corrupted.  It's pretty 
common knowledge that the mbox format isn't the best or most efficient 
way to store email, since it involves a large file that the program has 
to append new messages to as they arrive.  Professor Dan Bernstein made 
the mbox format pretty much obsolete when he invented Maildir with 
qmail, and most all of the unix graphical email clients like KMail or 
Evolution use Maildir format now.  Any server admin who uses mbox on an 
smtp/pop server is pretty much considered irresponsible anymore, so it 
baffles me as to why AppleMail uses mbox format.
--
Chris