[Dovecot] Mailbox formats

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Wednesday, February 25, 2004 7:43 PM +0200 Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> 
wrote:

> 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 was thinking mbox vs maildir. mbx isn't much bigger than mbox, mainly 
adding the metadata at the front, about 1k per folder.

>> 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).

Interesting point. I hadn't considered using ReiserFS for my mail 
directories. Sounds like a good motivation to try it out.

> 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.

He mentioned a new format in passing on the comp.mail.imap group, still in 
the experimental stage.