On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 15:49 +0100, David Lee wrote:
(Complete newbie to dovecot. I hope what follows isn't something I've missed in some FAQ somewhere...)
On a traditional UNIX filesystem with UW-IMAP several years ago, we encountered major performance problems when "/var/spool/mail/" got big (we would currently be ~20,000 entries). This was due to the inefficiency of the UNIX filesystem when creating and deleting the lockfiles (etc.) in a directory of that size.
We worked around that (all those years ago) with a local source-code mod to UW-IMAP ("c-client") to use subdirectories "/var/spool/mail/00/" to "/var/spool/mail/99/" based on a trivially simply "uid mod 100" algorithm. (Our uids are random; our usernames are not.) Thus we had 100 subdirs each of about 200 entires. Efficiency and performance vastly improved, and we've been running like that ever since.
Now we are considering migrating to dovecot...
Does dovecot do file creation/deletion in this (or similar shared) directory? (And so would it be liable to the same inefficiency problems?)
Is there some means in the "dovecot.conf" file to specify an INBOX pattern as "/var/spool/mail/%ZZZ%/%u" where "%ZZZ%" could be algorithmically specified as (say) "user-uid mod 100"?
look in variables.txt that comes in the tarball.
I think the %H will have some of what you're looking for - or segments of the %u
-sv