In article <54ED5403-ECBF-40B7-84CB-459BF348EF20@xxxxxxxxxx> you write: >I agree completely. I'm just pointing out that there's no standard for the various "mailbox archive" formats. E.g. mbox, MH, maildir. IMAP >provides a(n IETF) standard interface. Maybe not the most efficient in this specific case, but beware of micro-optimization. I agree about not micro-optimizing but it leads me to a different answer. Having been schlepping mbox files for 40 years, I can report that even though there are a lot of variations, they are minor enough that it is easy to handle them all. There have for decades been libraries and applications that do so, such as mhonarc which turns mbox files into pretty archive web pages. Similarly, although the file naming conventions in mh and maildor are different, the messages in the files are the same and again it is easy to handle the naming differences. IMAP is fine for what it's good for, but the question of how you store archives of mail messages was answered a long time ago. R's, John