Greetings,
I noticed a while back someone posted a patch/plugin that allowed Dovecot to use compressed mbox files. I'm now wondering how far that would put us from having compressed maildir? I have a server with more CPU than disk space, and while I can buy more HDD space, my backup solution doesn't make that practical.
It seems to me that when looking for a message file, if it ends in .gz unpack it, and otherwise everything acts as normal. Worst case, this is one strcat() and a stat() slower to find.
Newly delivered messages could remain unpacked, and a cron job could come by whenever to compress old/large/un-looked-at-for-months messages. So, new and frequently referenced messages would be as fast as ever, and older messages would be slower.
I would love to dive in an do this myself, but 1- my time is very very limited, working two jobs, and 2- I'm not running 1.0 yet, as it apparently still doesn't support my Thunderbird users tagging their messages (am I wrong? please tell me I'm wrong... I want to upgrade! :)
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net