[Dovecot] Performance with 200k messages in Maildir

[Vegard Svanberg]

What should I expect performance-wise if I put 200000 messages in a
Maildir store and use two or three MUAs (mutt and Thunderbird), on an
Athlon dual core 2GHz with SATA drives in software RAID (Linux)?

Like; would it be useless/crawling, usable or pretty fast. I imagine MUA
startup / first time folder read would be slow, but daily use more or
less ok.

Thanks to Dovecot's indexing, I imagine I would be better off
interfacing Mutt to Maildir via IMAP and Dovecot rather than accessing
Maildir/ directly?

-- 
Vegard Svanberg <vegard at svanberg.no> [*Takapa at IRC (EFnet)]