On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 14:18 +0100, Alan Brown wrote:
This is something Timo hacked up for me a few years ago and I realised should be on the list in case anyone else wants them.
The following patches will limit maildir folders to 4000 messages on Dovecot 2.0.* and 2.1.*
The Specfile patch is against the Cityfan Redhat EL5 SRPM but is likely to work on most build platforms
Changing the message limit requires a recompile. It's brutal and ugly but it prevents users overloading FSes that can't cope with huge numbers of files (EG: GFS2)
Perhaps you should try mdbox some day?
Another related thing someone asked about was about making kind of an "alt storage" to Maildir by keeping new mails in new/ and older mails in cur/. So that if the Maildir has like 1M messages Dovecot would only very rarely need to scan/modify cur/ because most of the changes would happen in new/.