[Dovecot] mbox vs. maildir storage block waste

[Timo Sirainen]

On 29.10.2012, at 22.54, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:

> I recently mentioned in several posts, that I'd tended to use mbox
> rather than maildir, because you don't loose so much space (due to
> always allocating full blocks per maildir file and thus per mail).
..
> In the end I probably changed my opinion.
> ~7GB of wasted block space for all my mails is actually quite a lot, but
> in days of cheap disk space it's acceptable.
> And with mbox one has IMHO the major disadvantage that mailservers
> (including dovecot) store some meta-data _in_ it (i.e. in the mails
> themselves) , which I don't like a lot.
> I still think about reports that mbox is much faster with full text
> search (which sounds reasonable)... but therefore one needs probably and
> database backend anyway.

There is of course mdbox also, which gives the best of both mbox and maildir (and some of its own new annoyances).