[Dovecot] Compressed mail archives

[Will Palmer]

On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 17:05 -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 2010-05-12 4:56 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:
> > On 2010-05-12 8:44 AM, Will Palmer wrote:
> >> Googling around, I've seen a lot of messages related to compressing
> >> individual messages in a maildir. However, what I'm really looking for
> >> is a solution which will allow multiple messages to be compressed into a
> >> single compressed file, while still allowing those messages to be
> >> accessed via IMAP.
> 
> > Heh... you might find this of interest:
> > 
> > http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/dbox
> 
> Sorry - specifically, the mdbox stuff, which is exactly what you are
> looking for... I don't think it is totally done, but I think it is very
> close...
> 

does sound exactly like what I'm looking for, though that question-mark
by the word "Compression" is a little less hopeful. I'll bite my lip for
now and see that it's something that's at least being worked-on.

Single-instance attachment storage sounds very useful too, though I
can't help but wonder if it can be extended to message bodies in
general. After all, no sense in storing five copies of a message just
because five people are on the list for it, right? Of course, that
sounds suspiciously like premature optimization, but still like
something that could help.

When using something like mdbox, does the smtp server (postfix, in my
case) need to be made aware of it, or does some other process take
responsibility for the conversion? (academic at this point, as I won't
be upgrading to 2.x any time soon)
-- 
-- Will