[Dovecot] Compressed maildir

[dean gaudet]

if space is an issue then mbox is a better choice than maildir... a lot 
less space wasted on directory/inode metadata and less space wasted on the 
tails of every message.  if you've got a 4096 byte block size filesystem 
without fragments then you're wasting 2048 bytes per message.

depending on the avg message size in your maildirs you might not even save 
much at all due to the tail problem.

-dean

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Curtis Maloney wrote:

> 
> 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
>