On 12.5.2010, at 14.44, Will Palmer wrote:
Googling around, I've seen a lot of messages related to compressing individual messages in a maildir. However, what I'm really looking for is a solution which will allow multiple messages to be compressed into a single compressed file, while still allowing those messages to be accessed via IMAP.
mbox is the only possibility for that. mdbox supports compression, but only one message at a time.
But really I don't even know if it's possible to have dovecot support MBox and Maildir simultaneously, nor do I know enough about the MBox format to even know if the IMAP-style "multiple mailboxes" thing is possible in MBox.
It is. Just create two namespaces, one for maildir (prefix="") and one for mbox (prefix=archive/). See examples in http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces
And of course, any way you slice it, 20,000 mails, compressed or not, sent to five people, take up 100,000 mails worth of space if you don't share them between accounts. (perhaps they could even simply be hard-linked to the same file?)
http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA : -p <path>: Path to the mail to be delivered instead of reading from stdin. If using maildir the file is hard linked to the destination if possible. This allows a single mail to be delivered to multiple users using hard links, but currently it also prevents deliver from updating cache file so it shouldn't be used unless really necessary. (v1.1+)