[Dovecot] Spliting Folders for Efficiency

[Daniel Watts]

Dear Timo,

Would there be any sense in giving Dovecot the option to split folders 
into multiple subfolders when they reached a specified size (probably 
message count) limit?

Dovecot would monitor folders and when they reached, say, 10,000 
messages, silently split the folder on the filesystem to ensure that 
access remains fast.

I know that Dovecot scales very well but this would give practically 
unlimited storage capability and also keep things fast. You could even 
have it so that the latest 100 messages are kept in their own folder for 
fast access.

.Folder.new
.Folder.cur
.Folder.tmp

could become:

.Folder__1.new
.Folder__1.cur
.Folder__1.tmp
and
.Folder__2.new
.Folder__2.cur
.Folder__2.tmp

with Dovecot merging them before display as just "Folder" within the 
mail client.

This could be further extended so that Dovecot could be configured to 
store 'old' message folders in a separate location. We could then have 
slower+cheaper+larger storage mounted so that 'old mail' does not take 
up the expensive local SCSI disks on the machine. Mail from 2 years ago 
is much less likely to be accessed than mail from the last week.

This would provide very neat behind-the-scenes archiving functionality.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best,
Daniel

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