[Dovecot] mailbox format w/ separate headers/data

[Frank Cusack]

On January 22, 2010 11:05:22 PM +0200 Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 15:53 -0500, Frank Cusack wrote:
>> In the future, it would be cool if there were a mailbox format (dbox2?)
>> where mail headers and each mime part were stored in separate files.
>> This would enable the zfs dedup feature to be used to maximum benefit.
>
> This is more or less what dbox's single instance storage is going to do.
> Maybe in half a year or so.. And you don't even need filesystem
> deduplication feature. :)

But if the mail system has to handle it, it only knows about mails
written at the same time.  For example, if postfix delivers mail
with a single recipient per mail (the recommended config somewhere,
not sure if recommended by postfix or by dovecot), dbox won't get
the opportunity to dedup.

And for mails which are re-forwarded (pretty common occurrence), again
dbox won't get the chance to dedup.

Or will there be a global index?

-frank