[Novalug] thinking about switching to maildir

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Tue Apr 3 19:18:24 EDT 2012


On 04/03/2012 06:03 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> instead of having to transfer a single large file i can transfer 
> individual mail files each one representing a single mail message. 
> you're probably confused b/c i'm not using rsync over ethernet. i 
> calculate what files are different and then put it on a key and 
> transfer it that way. rsync doesn't provide any mechanism for 
> transfering just the changes so i need to transfer the entire file. if 
> i do a single byte change in a 100MB file i need to transfer it. it 
> takes a little longer to do it this way, but it's cheaper. 

OH! I think I getcha now. You want to back up the entire mailbox, not 
using the native IMAP/POP protocols (which would parse the MBOX and give 
you messages) but grab "inbox.mbx" or whatever. Ah.

In that case, then yes, maildir will help. Since each message is a 
different file you could use rsync or some other process to backup 
whatever is new/changed for each message, rather then dumping the entire 
"inbox.mbx" file.

Actually you could probably do it with POP or IMAP and some perl. Or 
what was that program ESR wrote a long time ago that used to grab the 
contents of your POP/IMAP and store it locally on your pc? It was 
popular with laptop people back in the day.

http://www.fetchmail.info/

Might do what you want without changing anything. There are some other 
scripts (ruby, python) that will do imap mailbox sync's, and since you 
could access each message AS a message, it would only transfer those 
messages that changed, not the whole file. But I didn't look closely at 
the scripts.

Nick



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