On 06-Sep-00 at 11:22:26 Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> J.Horne@??? said:
>> Just wondering why Exim seems to support maildir/mbx/mailstore mailbox
>> formats, but not MH? The software itself seems to still be in
>> development - my first thought was that it was not used any more. I'm
>> trying to sort out a small problem with an MH mailbox, and will use
>> procmail.
>
> Despite being a long time user of MH, there are *serious* problems with
> the MH mailbox format which make it a pig to support, specifically:-
>
> MH is a real problem for an MTA, so its better to skip it and leave it
> to an MDA such as rcvstore (note this doesn't do locking either, so if
> you use procmail you should have a per folder/directory lock file to
> prevent collisions which really *do* happen - I've seen them.
>
Thanks for the warning! The 'problem' we have is that both myself and the
'postmasters' use an old mail client (XFMail) which uses standard Unix
mailbox format or MH format. Personally I receive a lot of mail per day, so
I filter it out to folders (MH format). The postmaster account receives a lot
of mail over a long period of time, and we want to take a copy of all
the mail it receives. XFMail has no provision for 'copy this message' :-(.
So I have been using an Exim filter/forward file to save onto the end of a
file (Unix (uucp?) format) which XFMail can then look at. This, however, is
*really* slow when we need to look at a copy of a message.
So, I started looking (a) for a new mail client - Mahogany and Mutt are the
possibilities (may even run both!); (b) started looking to see how I could
improve things with copies in the short-term. I knew that Exim could handle
other mailbox formats, but found nowt about the MH format - hence the
question. I don't use Mh/nmh or exmh (did take a peek at it though), but do
want/need the MH mailbox format for the moment.
If Mahogany/mutt can do copies in their filtering and use some form of
directory mailbox then we probably shalln't need procmail.
Thanks again,
John.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne@???
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