On 15Oct2020 11:06, Ranjan Maitra <maitra(a)email.com> wrote:
Thanks, yes, I used to use mbox long ago, when I did not understand
things clearly, and I used pine then, but I moved to mh with the move to sylpheed. An
added benefit is in backups. I have never lost any mail on mh so far, but I wonder if I am
simply tempting fate by not moving to Maildir (I do not completely understand the issues).
Mostly the races.
To add, remove or flag in MH probably requires a locking mechanism while
updating the message number lists (and correspondingly, allocating new
message numbers). You also don't know an arriving message is complete unless
it isn't numbered yet; I imagine an MH insert goes
save-completely-to-tempfile, allocate-number, rename-tempfile-to-number,
update-number-lists. A lock would need to be held over the last three
steps.
Maildir is race free. Messages get unqiue filenames (composed of various
sufficently unique values combined), are created in the "tmp" subdir,
and renamed into the "new" subdir. Read messages are renamed from
"new"
to "cur". No shared number lists, no locks. You only look for messages
in "new" and "cur".
Separately, I am still trying to figure out if there are still major
advantages to using mutt vs. neomutt.
My advice would be: start with mainline mutt (because I know the maintenance
situation is active) and consider neomutt if there's some specific missing
feature you want (if neomutt has it, of course). But ask on the mutt-users
list about features; some things are available and/or doable without always
being immediately obvious.
You can also try both - mutt, hmm missing feature, neomutt. You may need
to maintain distinct config files for each, but they can share mail folders.
Also, config files can source other config files, so you might have:
.muttrc-common-config
.muttrc
.muttrc-neomutt
with the last 2 both sourcing .muttrc-common-config and then adding
a few specific tweaks.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au>