Hello, I have recently begun using IMAP to access my mails, and have found that the size of my maildir is quickly getting larger than I had anticipated. 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. The reasoning behind this is that most of my incoming mail consists of many very-similar messages (for example, it is not unheard of for me to receive 10,000 emails detailing the same error report over a weekend, with the actual "needs to be processed" parts stuck on the end of each message)
I'm expecting a simple "no, there's no way to do that", but I wouldn't mind being pleasantly surprised. My question again: Is there any way to keep a bundle of older mails compressed, so that they can enjoy the high compression of being very similar to each-other, while still allowing access via imap?
A solution may involve (just throwing out ideas here, which I have no idea how to implement) putting messages older than N days into an MBox file, and either somehow linking my account to that file (so that my account consists of [compressed readonly Mbox]+[live uncompressed Maildir]), or perhaps the first half of that, but accessing archived messages through a separate account. (Not the preferred way, but if it's the only way, I'll do it) 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.
Please excuse my no-doubt confused terminology and general air of doesn't-know-what-he's-talking-about. The internals of e-mail are generally not my thing, so I'd appreciate any pointing in the right direction which anyone may have to offer.
Any ideas?