What are the practical differences between Maildir and Mbox?

Don’t manage mailboxes from postfix. Never. Redirect messages for delivery via POP/IMAP server that has appropriate functionality. In case of dovecot there is dovecot-lda aka deliver that do everything and much more, like user-controlled message filtering, quota management, autoreplying and so on.

Anyway maildir is newer and preferrable format due to the lot of improvements comparatively to maibox. Maildir has an index for each folder that allow to control duplicates, expiration times and even full-text search. Also, maildir is significantly faster on a huge pile of messages. Dovecot can easily operate maildir with 300k messages in it without any visible slowdown. Mailbox such big is a problem itself. Also, most modern POP/IMAP servers has a lot of utilities for common tasks in large infrastructure.

Leave a Comment