On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, dean gaudet wrote:
To address the situation you want, readonly archival, my vision would be a compressed maildir (or equivalent), using each mail as a separately compressed entry. Zip is a pretty good format for this purpose. Though per-file compression is typically only about half as efficient as whole-mbox compression, you'd have much faster search and retrieval if the file entries had their own compression dictionaries.
so basically it's a classic tradeoff: speed vs. space... if you design with mbox instead of maildir then you get to decide where to set the tradeoff... whereas if you use compressed maildir you've given up on space immediately. (and i'm not so convinced you get any speed, because i find maildirs with 100000 entries to be a total dog.)
By a Zip-compressed maildir, I'm referring to a zipfile with each message as a *zip entry*, not a physical file. Think "zip up a maildir into a single zipfile" and you'll get very close to the concept I'm trying to describe.
That sort of thing is much faster at entry retrieval than a monolithic stream-compressed container.
-- -- Todd Vierling tv@duh.org tv@pobox.com todd@vierling.name