[Dovecot] Mailbox formats

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 22:38, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> I'm currently using mbox and mbx with UW-IMAP, mbox for space efficiency 
> and mbx for folders with lots of messages for time efficiency without a 
> large space cost. 

The reason why mbx takes more space is that it uses CR+LF linefeeds
instead of just LF..

> I've avoided maildir because it has a relatively high 
> space cost; mbox has no inter-message cost while maildir wastes on average 
> half a sector plus an inode for each message.

AFAIK ReiserFS doesn't lose any space (or much).

> What other formats are there, and has anyone come up with a good format 
> that gives both good time and space characteristics without sacrificing 
> reliability?
> 
> (I'm aware of the file format list in the UW-IMAP distro: 
> <http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/formats.txt.html>)

UW-IMAP's author is thinking of some hybrid format where a single
mailbox could be built from multiple files, but a single file could
contain multiple messages. I think this could be made to work pretty
well and reliably. I don't know more about his plans though, I didn't
find any discussion about it in c-client list at least.

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