Hi,
I'm very fond of maildirs, they are simple, I like that.
But I've never really understood the significance of maildir/new/. The only use I can see is that (for example in the case of dovecot), you'd move a message from new to cur and then update the index-file, that's it.
So to make put it more direct, you'd know when and with what to update the index-file, based on where the file resides.
I've never been bothered by them, until I found that that is the last hurdle for fast access to a large (and receiving a lot of mail) Maildir.
I've been thinking long and hard about what to do to make them work even better.
My idea at this point is the following, use maildir/new as little as possible, just use it for what it was intented and spread the time of updates.
If someone would make a wrapper-program around the delivery-program (like qmail-local, vpopmaildeliver, procmail or local and virtual from postfix) and the delivery program would print to standard output the path+filename it saved a (or more) message(s) to, the wrapper would be able to send an update-message to a dovecot-daemon.
That mean, updates are small, and opening a large maildir would be sped up.
How does that sound ?
I hope this is a helpfull suggestion.
New things are always on the horizon.