On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 15:42 +0100, Jiaying Xu wrote:
I know dovecot is on the mailbox format front, it supports both mbox and maildir format well, and is developing and experimenting a new flexible format, dbox.
But is there any plan to add mbx (i.e., indexed mbox format) support, to complete the set?
Not by me at least. I don't really see a need for it other than helping conversion from UW-IMAP.
But is "indexed mbox format" really a proper name for mbx? It's in no way compatible with mbox format and I wouldn't even call it "indexed".
Now the problem is, we have to use the tranditional mbox format with dovecot, as it does not support indexed mbox format, which makes deleting messages costly.
I'm not exactly sure why deleting messages with mbx is any less costly, because it works practically the same way as with mbox: moving all data after deleted data over the deleted data.
Also the long-time file locking (due to the slow operation on the dovecot side) causes our MTA (exim, by the way) holds a huge queue. That drives up the system load to mad (load average above 500 is not unusual in our case).
dbox should work nicely for that situation. :) It doesn't lock files for reading, writing new mails don't block other writes and expunges should be pretty fast. It finally even seems to be working in latest CVS version, but I guess it still needs a bit more testing before I'd recommend using it..