Traditionally CPanel has been using MBOX for the mailboxes storage and its internal pop3 server (cpop). It took them some time to realize that this was not the best solution and to offer a solution to migrate to MAILDIR and courier as the pop3/imap server. This has been available for a while (since Nov 2005) but it was never the default and because of that, not active on so many servers. The process to migrate to maildir is very simple, but it needs manual intervention and the sysadmin to know about this feature.

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Maildir is a huge improvement over mbox for storing local mails of users. Why? I will not go into a long explanation about this, because it is not the scope of this post, but just consider that saving each mail in its own file on the disk (Maildir) opposed to saving all mails in a single file (mbox) is much faster. Not only faster, but it is also much easier to manipulate the files (that are individual mails) on the system. For more details on maildir vs. mbox you can see http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

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