I already E-mailed the author of the Maildir standard about this, but I didn’t get a reply. Other people who asked the same question told me they got the same reaction: none. Of course I don’t know for sure whether they actually tried.
Nowadays people use FAT32 a lot for storing their data on flash disk and USB sticks. They buy these at a computer shop or supermarket, plug it in their mobile device and they expect it to just work. They don’t want us to require them to reformat the device’s partition. Quite often do these people already have actual (thus, important) data on those storage devices.
I know that some people live in a imaginary Utopical world where FAT32 is a piece of shit filesystem where we not only puke on it, we also ignore it and religiously hate its authors. The problem is that I live in the realistic and pragmatic world and that I ignore people who try to force me to live in their imaginary Utopical worlds. I really have no time for the religious anti Microsoft rebellions who want me to become one of their crusaders.
In stead, I try to use the time nature has given to me to do things that can actually be done. You see, trying to get Microsoft to support the ‘:’ character on FAT32 is not among those goals of mine. Although, sure, I too don’t know why they don’t support it. I too dislike the fact that they don’t support it. I too wish live was different. In fact, I think I remember that I wanted to be born as an ant with gigantic colourful butterfly wings living in a delicious and fresh cow .. shed. In stead, they created me as a normal human.
It’s not fair!
Nevertheless, this is what happened.
So I noticed that one person decided to ignore the Maildir standard and replace the vicious ‘:’ character with ‘!’. I propose to make the Maildir standard more meaningful by changing this ‘:’ character to ‘!’. This way we can allow our users to put the E-mail data on standard USB sticks, flash cards and other media that comes with the evil, satanic, bad, ugly and patented FAT32 partition type.
I know people will tell me to use a different format for FAT32 partitions. Well, Maildir is not really bad for slow storages and it gives you easy atomic operations: rename() is, as far as I know, atomic on all (and if not most) platforms. The kernel is good at doing its own indexing for filesystems, so it’s not slow either. The idea behind Maildir is not a bad one. Most of the other local formats are kinda broken in different ways too. I could create my own standard, of course, but then I’ll get that other group of anti NIH religious rebellions who’ll start armed protest marches in front of my house.