[Dovecot] Multiple Patitions with with mdbox

[Timo Sirainen]

On 8.11.2011, at 16.19, Peer Heinlein wrote:

> Having > 10 TByte mailstore filesystem-checks takes too much time.
> 
> At the moment we have four different partitions, but I don't like to set 
> symlinks or LDAP-flags to sort customers and their domains to there 
> individual mount-point. I'd like to work with mdbox:/mail/%d/%n to calculate 
> the path automatically.

Why not symlinks? You could use e.g. /mail/%16Hu/%d/%n as part of the path which would give you one hex letter when hashing the username (0..9, a..f). So then you could create symlinks like:

/mail/0 -> /storage1
/mail/1 -> /storage2
..etc..

> I'm very interested in the feature "alternative mailstore" with mdbox, 
> because that makes it very easy to use at least TWO filesystems without any 
> tricky configuration.
> 
> I think I'd love to have <n> alternative mailstores. Why does dbox doesn't 
> look for its m.*-files in more then two directorys? Sure, looking in 4 
> directorys would lead to four disc operations, but maybe it could be very 
> helpful.

The current implementation uses a simple message flag to tell when/where to move the mail, so the code would have to get much more complicated with more alt paths.