[Dovecot] mbox vs. maildir storage block waste

[Timo Sirainen]

On 30.10.2012, at 13.00, Charles Marcus wrote:

> On 2012-10-29 5:42 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>> On 29.10.2012, at 23.15, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>> 
>>> btw: What are the actual advantages of sdbox over maildir?
>>  * Not moving files from new/ to cur/ directory
>>  * Not renaming files when changing message flags
>>  * Not readdir()ing directories (although maildir_very_dirty_syncs=yes helps a lot with this)
>> 
>> Basically less disk I/O and making it possible to have mailboxes with a huge number of messages without everything slowing down horribly.
> 
> I had been wanting to ask about this too...
> 
> So... what are the disadvantages?

Message flags are stored only in dovecot.index files, and files get somewhat more easily corrupted than the whole filesystem. Having a separate dovecot.index.backup file helps with this though. Also there's the disadvantages if you can't easily switch away from Maildir because you're using some non-Dovecot tools to access it.