[Dovecot] mbox vs maildir

[Jesse C. Smillie]

Wow this is weird because I'm about to make this same jump next week!

 From what I'm reading so far the big draw back with mbox is the single 
file with all the emails in it.  When you delete a message from that 
file the whole file has to be rewritten without that email in it.  If 
the box is big enough that can be a serious drag on the server.  We have 
been using Dovecot here all school year for Imap & Pop3 with the Mbox 
format and when two or more people delete at the same time the 
utilization on my 3ware card shoots up.  We bought the BBU unit for the 
3ware so I could enable WRITE cache and that has helped tremendously. 

I thought this study in regards to speed was quite interesting:
 http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/ 
<http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/>

So far my testing conversion process has gone really well.  I am 
surprised how easy it was to tell procmail to do MailDir instead and 
even the conversion process was super easy.  For converting the old 
inbox and folders I am using the tool  mb2md.pl from 
http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

I was having a really hard time figuring all of this out until I ran 
into this webpage:
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/2007/04/18/adams-super-simple-guide-to-mbox-maildir-conversion/

I know through namespaces you can do inbox in one type and other boxes 
in another type.  I was initially thinking about doing all new stuff in 
maildir and still support the old ~/mail format.  The setup seemed easy 
enough, but I figured in the long run I am shutting down the server for 
a few hours to do this so I mis well go all the way. 

The only thing I'm not sure of is what the best file system to keep this 
on.  I have been keeping my home directories on ReiserFS for quite a 
while, but one of our tech thinks XFS would be good.  All data I have 
right now tells me to stay ReiserFS though.  Even Dovecot's own page 
says XFS may not be a wise choice.

Hope some of this stuff helps you.  My server BTW is:
Slackware Slamd64 11 (Added Kerberos, Dovecot, etc after the fact)
Dual AMD Opteron 242s
4 Gigs RAM
800 Gig RAID 5 3G SATA array
ReiserFS on /home /var/spool/mail


-Jesse C. Smillie

"Insert inspirational or witty comment here...."



Don Russell wrote:
> I'm using Dovecot 1.0.1-12 on Linux/Fedora 7
> along with sendmail and procmail all running on the same box
> mail is stored in mbox format
>
> It's a small system with a half dozen or so e-mail "accounts". Each 
> with 40-60MB of messages in various folders.
>
> I keep seeing messages about how mbox is antiquated and anybody with 
> more than 100 messages etc should not use mbox, but use maildir instead.
>
> I'm not entirely convinced.... there seem to be pros and cons for 
> each. Is there a discussion somewhere that really highlights why one 
> format is so much better than the other?
>
> The last time I tried to convert from mbox to maildir, things got 
> pretty botched up, no data loss, but it wasn't pretty. :-)
>
> Can Dovecot handle mbox for some users and maildir for others? I'd 
> like to try a conversion for one user... I'll probably create a new 
> user, then have procmail copy (via ! action code) all mail for one 
> user to that new user.
>
> Thank you
>
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