[Dovecot] maildir location

[upen]

Hello,

I am trying to use dovecot (v. 2.0.11) and postfix (v. 2.7.3)
together.  The email server is an ldap client and user's home
directories on NFS server are mounted using autofs.

As I understand, Maildir performance is better than mbox type, so I'd
like to use Maildir instead of mbox.

However, when I checked conf.d/10-mail.conf file, there is
mail_location = maildir:~/.maildir already configured in it which
means user's email will reside in their home directories on the NFS
server rather than being on Email server's local storage where plenty
of space is available.  I anticipate due to NFS there will again be a
performance hit .

Question : Can I change mail_location for maildir to be somewhere
other than ~/.maildir. ( like /var/mail/%u/Maildir, where /var/mail is
local storage). There are about 200 ldap users who will be using this
email server through squirrel-mail or access them through email
clients.

By the way, I am confused about one setting in postfix : home_mailbox
= .maildir/ in main.cf . Does this really play any role? If so, which
parameter should be changed and to what and with what permissions to
the new directory.

Hope I was able to explain, if not please let me know for more details..

Thanks,
U