MailDir and mail apps? [WAS: Re: dot-qmail questions]

On Wednesday 04 June 2003 11:01 am, Deepak Saxena wrote:
> Ok, dumb question time from me. How does a mailer like mutt
> deal with maildir-based mail? Does each maildir have a hashed
> index? I can see the advantages of having one message per file
> as I have mboxes which are > 50MB in size and take a ridiculously
> long time to load, but can all mail apps deal with them and how
> does something like search work?

The maildir format doesn't specify any sort of indexing. However, a number of
maildir-enabled MUAs do their own indexing. For instance, KMail creates an
index for for all of its mailboxes, including maildir ones.

In my experience, very very large mailboxes using maildir tend to be quite a
bit slower than mbox to load up the first time but are noticably faster
loading every time after that (assuming an indexing mua).