[Dovecot] maildir vs mdbox

[Timo Sirainen]

On 28.1.2012, at 17.59, Jean-Daniel Beaubien wrote:

> I am planning on running on test between maildir and mdbox to see which is
> a better fit for my use case. And I'm just looking for general
> advice/recommendation. I will post any results I obtain here.

Maildir is good for reliability, since it's just about impossible to corrupt, and even in case of filesystem corruption it's easier to recover than other formats. mdbox is good if you want the best performance.

> Important question: I have multiple users hitting the same email account at
> the same time. Can be a problem with mdbox?

No problem.

> - Serving only a hand full of email accounts but some of the accounst have
> over 3 millions emails in them (with individual mail folders having 100k+
> emails)

Maildir gets slow with that many mails in one folder.

> - fts-lucene or fts-solr?


fts-lucene uses the latest CLucene version, which is a little old. With fts-solr you can use the latest Solr/Lucene. So as long as you don't mind setting up a Solr instance it should be better. The good thing about fts-lucene is that you can simply enable it and it works without any external servers.