[Dovecot] Maildir messages
Wojciech Puchar
wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl
Fri Jul 13 12:09:56 EEST 2012
> specifically from a filesystem IO perspective:
>
> 1. new mail delivery
not much difference.
> 2. searching a mailbox folder
if you do linear search then yes
> 3. mass deletion of emails from one mailbox folder
>
3 is not true.
> maildir is more IO efficient when reading and deleting individual emails.
>
and making backups.
deleting from maildir means just delete a file, not shuffle data.
Everyone needs to make backups while it is unlinkely that anyone like
every backup to be effectively full backup.
> mbox puts the load on the mail server application and on memory.
and on I/O too - often quite a bit
> maildir puts the load on the IO subsysetem. Which is precisely why Timo
> created the mdbox mail storage format, attempting to get the best of
> both worlds.
And this is great idea and actually works :)
mbox may make sense for archive storage. you create archive folder once
and never modify anything
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