Re: [CSCMail-Users] Bad spam

[Steven K. <st...@vo...>]

On 21 Jun 2000 07:58:02 PDT, Meph Istopheles said:

>   CZ,
>  
>    It finally dawned on me to move the stuff in the Inbox I want to
>  keep to another floder & use the Empty Selected Folder feature to get
>  rid of these spams.	Bit of a drag, but a hell of a lot easier than
>  opening every non-descript message in the cscmail subdirectories.

Hehe, that is one way to do it...
  
>    Just out of curiosity, is that a function of the database which
>  lists the messages in such an unfriendly manner, or did you do that
>  for some reason?  Even the annoying NSCommunicator lists them by
>  folder & makes them one big file by that folder name.  If you'd made
>  this setup, wouldn't it have been easier to do it as either NSC or
>  pine?

Basically, we did it for speed reasons... First, we used to embed the
messages directly in the database, but that had portability issues, so we
moved the mail out to sub folders.  Initally we mixed all the mail in one
big folder, but it was still individual files per message, then someone
told me (falsly I might add) that there was a limit to the number of
files in a folder, so I devised the numbered subfolder scheme.	The
reason, however that messages are all in seperate files is that:

1: no file access is needed to move a message from one folder to another,
just an update to the index (ie: we use vFolders, have since version 1,
and so Evolution is NOT origional in this claim... dispite their loud
assertions to the contrary)

2: it is much faster when viewing a message to just load and deal with a
single file that  is the whole message.  Having to seek through a 20 meg
file to find the one message you wish to view is a bit cumbersome. 

3: I was not a very skilled programmer when I started CSCMail, and it
seemed a good idea at the time.  You should know that Version 2.0.0 of
CSCMail uses an MBOX format message store (similar to Netscape and Pine)
with the addition of an index file and this seems to overcome the points
1 and 2 problems fairly well.  This "indexed MBOX" format is not
"unique."  In fact, Netscape has always done something like this. I
modeled my format closely after a document discussing such things by the
author of versions 2 and 3 of Netscape Mail. Netscape 4 has bloated the
index to such an extreme that it is no longer the same beast, and in
fact, the index is often as much as 50% of the size of the MBOX file,
while in CSCMail 2.0.0 the index for a 30 meg MBOX only takes up 700k
(2%)

Anyway, I hope I answered your questions...

-CZ
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