[ale] Mailbox format hell

[Stephen Pellicer]

Ok, so I finally got my home server upgraded. I 
really like how the Mandrake distribution is laid out. Since I'm mucking about 
with this box, I decided to try and fix something that's been sketchy for a 
while at my home setup: mail. I got fetchmail pulling in mail from a couple mail 
sources and delivering them to the local postfix (I'm trying to get used to this 
as I used to use sendmail). This gets sorted out with procmail. I then access 
this from various sources via UW imap.
Here's the problem: I get sporadic performance via 
imap that I think is due to the fact that I have my mail in mbox format. 
Everything I read in the UW imap docs and things hates this. Most people I talk 
to hates this format. blah, blah, blah. I could care less what format my mail is 
in. UW imap seems to prefer .mbx which is something pretty unique to them. I 
wouldn't mind using .mbx but I'd then lose all of my procmail functionality. I 
could easily solve all of this by downloading packages with patches, etc. and 
build up a system that all works together. I want to stick to stock Mandrake 
packages though. I figure this has gotta be pretty covered territory so I'm 
probably just missing something.
The sporadic problems I'm having seem to be related 
to locking on the mbox files and such. Some programs like Microsoft Outlook 
(yeah, yeah) can't even get the inbox open. KMail, Outlook Express and the like 
open it just fine but there are noticeable delays and performance is pretty 
sucky.
 
Any tips appreciated,
Stephen