[OS X TeX] OT: Choice between Panther and Tiger

[Aaron Jackson]

On May 8, 2005, at 3:59 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Thinking about all the things that've been said about Tiger in a week, 
> the pros and cons, and about the people that may be wondering whether 
> it's worth to upgrade: one very important thing to realize is that, as 
> far as email is concerned, the change is irreversible.
>
> When loading Mail in Tiger for the first time, you will be asked 
> whether you allow your mailboxes to be converted for use in Tiger. The 
> conversion is actually not trivial: for compatibility with SpotLight, 
> your mailboxes, which were all kept in Unix-compatible format, as a 
> mbox file inside a .mbox bundle, will be separated into a multitude of 
> .emlx files, one per message. The new organisation of a mailbox will 
> be, for example:
>
> OS X TeX.mbox:
>     Info.plist
>     Messages
>         15752.emlx
>         15753.emlx
>         ...
>     content_index
>     mbox
>     mbox.SKindex
>     mbox.SKindex.isValid
>     table_of_contents
>
> As new messages come in, the original mbox file won't be updated, 
> neither will be the accompanying files table_of_contents etc.; 
> instead, the new messages will all be added as individual .emlx files 
> inside the Messages subfolder.
>
> This means that it won't be possible to easily import your mailboxes 
> in Mozilla or Thunderbird say, should you consider later to switch 
> emailer or change platform.

I haven't gone through this myself, as I haven't yet got Tiger, but it 
sounds like you are describing maildir format.  See 
http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html for more info.  If so, then 
this is very much a standard and there are many conversion utilities 
available to switch between mbox and maildir format.  The benefit of 
maildir over mbox is that messages are individual files.  Instead of 
parsing through on 500MB file you look through a directory with many 
smaller files.  Theoretically, this has a smaller memory requirement 
for the mail application.

Aaron

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>