On Tue, 2022-03-08 at 10:16 -0600, c. marlow wrote:
So I tried what you said:
Created a folder called TEST opened up Nautilus into a small window then opened the TEST FOLDER in Evo and brought back up Nautilius and dragged that .mbox file into the TEST FOLDER
Wow, that works so much faster than importing!
I never tested the actually running speed of one method against another, though I suspect they're the same, but operationally it was far less mucking around for me to migrate a lot of mail between two mail servers.
Now I understand what you keep calling a " MAIL SPOOL" aka the .mbox files.
It's an old-school term, but with mbox (and a few other formats), each message is concatenated (that's where the cat command gets its name, it's nothing to do with kittens) into one large text file, with each message one after another. While those spools have the convenience of one file per mail folder, they have the inconveniences that it's intensive to parse through text and find the beginning and end of each message, and sometimes that spectacularly fails because of the particular content of some messages.
Most mail clients that keep mail in a spool file keep their own index of where all the message boundaries are (again a potential failure point), so it can more quickly display things, but if you change the spool by moving messages from the middle it has to recalculate all its indexes. I found Evolution to grind to a halt when it had to deal with very large ones. Other clients will, too, but I've only really had large files to deal with while I was using Evolution.
I've been running my own mail server probably around 20 years, and when it comes to lots of mail my experience is that maildir is far less painful than spool files.