[Dovecot] Compressed maildir

[Curtis Maloney]

Greetings,

	I noticed a while back someone posted a patch/plugin that allowed Dovecot to 
use compressed mbox files.  I'm now wondering how far that would put us from 
having compressed maildir?  I have a server with more CPU than disk space, and 
while I can buy more HDD space, my backup solution doesn't make that practical.

	It seems to me that when looking for a message file, if it ends in .gz unpack 
it, and otherwise everything acts as normal.  Worst case, this is one strcat() 
and a stat() slower to find.

Newly delivered messages could remain unpacked, and a cron job could come by 
whenever to compress old/large/un-looked-at-for-months messages.  So, new and 
frequently referenced messages would be as fast as ever, and older messages 
would be slower.

	I would love to dive in an do this myself, but 1- my time is very very limited, 
working two jobs, and 2- I'm not running 1.0 yet, as it apparently still doesn't 
support my Thunderbird users tagging their messages (am I wrong?  please tell me 
I'm wrong... I want to upgrade! :)

--
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net