Since I didn't get any bytes for this question, I'll pose it a different way.
From http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation#indexfiles :
== Index files
Index files are by default stored under the same directory as mails. With maildir they are stored in the actual maildirs, with mbox they are stored under .imap/ directory. You may want to change the index file location if you're using NFS or if you're setting up shared mailboxes.
You can change the index file location by adding :INDEX=<path> to mail_location. For example:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=/var/indexes/%u The index directories are created automatically, but note that it requires that Dovecot has actually access to create the directories. Either make sure that the index root directory (/var/indexes in the above example) is writable to the logged in user, or create the user's directory with proper permissions before the user logs in.
If you really want to, you can also disable the index files completely by appending :INDEX=MEMORY.
How are people setting the INDEX for mbox_snarf if you are using NFS?
I'm guessing I will just be rewriting lib-storage/index/mbox/ to have a choice of directories or creating 2 new files for mbox_snarf that look alot like the mbox driver index code. Was there a reason to not have a variable for index files for mbox_snarf?
Thanks, Jonathan