

mbx
===


A high performance mbox-replacement created by Marc Crispin of University of Washington for UW-IMAP. Each message in the file is preceded by a record carrying all the metadata that IMAP-protocol needs. This allows changing the metadata easily by modifying the fixed-size header, rather than moving data around in a file like with mbox. 
File locking is handled more intelligently (only appends may need to wait for locks), making this format a good choice for shared mailboxes. 
Downsides contain: 

 * Messages don't get deleted from disk until there's only one client accessing the mailbox, so you may need to add some forced downtime to get it done. 
 * Works only in local filesystem. 
 * Expunging is still as costly and as fragile as with mbox. 

(This file was created from the wiki on 2007-12-11 04:42)
