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My mailbox is full of subfolders inside the INBOX. I'm collecting/organizing my stuff in there.

Is there any advantage when saving mails in flat folder structure? Instead:

INBOX
  - ToDo
     - urgent
     - somewhen
  - Lists
     - Amazon
     - Links
...

Something like this:

INBOX
ToDo
  - urgent
  - somewhen
Lists
  - Amazon
  - Links
...

I haven't had any problems with the former - so I'm asking this just out of curiosity, if there are any advantages of one over the other, because lastly I saw a couple of comments, where current servers seem to handle imap pathlayouts differently, e.g. when it comes to syncing (e.g. imapsync or other related tools).

Just to make sure: I don't mean if there's an advantage of DOING the one or the other, since that is more like a personal preference. But if there are technically any benefits of one over the other.

1
  • Is there a practical underlining/noticeable benefit to using one over the other? No (IMAP will just view them as folders and will sync them from top to bottom, there isn't really much different between A or B in your exampleS). Is this objectively more beneficial to the user? There's no real answer to this because it depends entirely on personal preference.
    – Dandy
    Feb 8, 2016 at 4:34

1 Answer 1

0

The answer to this would depend on the mail server and its configuration, however any performance differences would be minimal unless you had A LOT of directories.

(

Relevant comments, but not directly in answer to your question:

IMAP servers typically handle directories as folders, and indeed the default in Dovecot - a very common IMAP server, is to treat the directories the same way, ie INBOX/dirname/* is stored in a similar way to dirname/* - ie it flattens out the config by default.

It is worth noting that it is important to keep boxes under control - especially your inbox and sent items, as some mail programs (particularly Outlook) tend to break if there are too many messages in a single mailbox

)

1
  • Thx - that's what I suspected, but I was a bit unsure, since I saw some discussions about the topic AND because export/import is handled very differently in mail-clients e.g. Apple Mail doesn't import hierarchical mboxes (it just imports messages from the first path segment).
    – Andy Fuchs
    Feb 8, 2016 at 11:05

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