[Dovecot] Spliting Folders for Efficiency

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 10:00 +0100, Daniel Watts wrote:

> .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.

Virtual folders would enable this, if they're implemented one day..

> 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.

dbox format will support this soon. So that you can configure two (or
more) directories for it and then Dovecot will look up the mail files
from each of them in order. It would also support automatically moving
non-recently accessed mails to the slower dirs.

The current dbox implementation in v1.1 supports only
one-message-per-file mode so it's quite similar to maildir. The main
problem with implementing fast/slow storage for maildir is that the
maildir filenames change all the time, so it would waste the slow
storage's I/O all the time when trying to figure out if a file is there
or not. dbox doesn't have this problem.

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