Maildir vs Mbox

Jul 6, 2020

Initially I had setup dimension.sh to use Maildir for its user mail store, as this was a preference of mine for all my dedicated servers over the years. In my view mbox was the legacy format doomed to be left behind while the superior Maildir ate its lunch and got all the newest, hottest tools wrote for it.

The problem is when you’re trying to setup a pubnix system with a legacy feel, it doesn’t really feel right excluding some tools that people want to use. For example using Maildir restricted the usable mail clients essentially down to mutt, which can be a bit of a beast to use at the best of times. ~gohan asked for alpine to be installed as it was his preferred client and the question came forefront again as to why I’ve setup Maildir.

Thankfully a patched version of alpine is available to support Maildir, so i’ve compiled a version and placed it on the Diemsion RPMs repository as alpine-maildir, for anyone interested.