Hello my good people.
Is the Mail Spool file in UNIX and LINUX basically equals to a PST file in Windows?
Basically this is were all emails for a particular user get downloaded and archived?
Thanks,
Welcome!
I think the mail spool file is provided by the mail server, and is like the Inbox in MS-Exchange.
The PST files in MS-Outlook are local copies; if you would delete them, you still would have the Inbox (all things that are provided by the MS Exchange service).
Hi @jmkmx,
usually there is no single spool file in *nix, but rather a spool directory, such as /var/spool/postfix or /var/spool/exim4. It contains various status information about the mail queue, retries etc of the SMTP server.
The Maildir format is usually used for emails in *nix these days: Emails are stored on the server as ASCII files (i.e. binary attachments like pictures are base64-encoded) in corresponding folders, usually under /home/user/Maildir or /var/mail/user, such as INBOX, Sent or Trash and other, by the client created ones. There are also various cache and index files there. Emails can then be managed by an IMAP server such as dovecot, courier etc, which is called by an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird.
An outdated format is Mbox, which stores emails in a single file and is therefore much less flexible because it doesn't support folders.
A PST file is a container that not only contains emails, but also e.g. calendar and contact information. It is a proprietary file format from M$, which is not used in the *nix world. But there are tools like https://linux.die.net/man/1/readpst to convert PST files into Maildir or Mbox format.