Well, after having used the go’old mbox format, I have now changed my mail setup to maildir. What a difference. I think the load on my machine is actual less then before the transition.

I used google (mbox convert maildir) to convert my setup to maildir, this was all relatively easy. Both postfix and procmail were “fixed” this way.

After restarting I indeed saw mail being deliverd to my newly created Maildir directory in my homedir. But I couldn’t read it…

/etc/skel⌗

Small sidestep:

The directory /etc/skel holds the skeleton directory for newly created users, so I’ve added a Maildir directory in here too.

Mutt As said, actual reading of Maildir-style mail from mutt was more of a problem than I thought. My final config snippet looks like this:

1. set mbox_type=Maildir
2. set folder="~/Maildir"
3. set mbox=+.old
4. set postponed=+.drafts
5. set record=+.sent
6. set spoolfile=+
7. set mask="!^\\.[^.]"
8. mailboxes ! +.spam +.old +.sent

1. Tell mutt your mail is in the Maildir format
2. Location of the directory
3. Where to move read mail to. I could not get it to go to a complete other directory. So now I have my old mail stored in the same directory as my new mail. There is a package called archivemail that might be of help here.
4. Where to put postponed mail, again in a subdir below Maildir.
5. Save sent mail, previously I’ve done this with a send-hook.
6. Where is you default mailbox located, this means: your default folder. Before I had this line in there, mutt kept looking for new mail in /var/mail.
7. Don’t recognize . and .. mailboxes
8. List all your mailboxes, ! is your default mailbox here.