[Dovecot] Compressed mail archives

[Charles Marcus]

On 2010-05-12 5:49 PM, Will Palmer wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 17:05 -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
>> On 2010-05-12 4:56 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:
>>> 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.

Also forgot:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Zlib?highlight=%28compress%29

I'm reasonably sure you could use this with dbox/mdbox now...

> 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.

It *could*, but personally I think that complicates the task
dramatically while providing much less benefit. The vast majority of
storage for email is due to binary attachments, not email body text.

Also, with compression, you get the best of both worlds (since text
compresses so well...

> 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)

You would obviously want to use the dovecot LDA, so which MTA used is
irrelevant...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles