Daniel Watts wrote:
Dear Timo,
Would there be any sense in giving Dovecot the option to split folders into multiple subfolders when they reached a specified size (probably message count) limit?
My understanding is this is partially covered in Timo's "dbox" format, which tries to take the best features of mbox and Maildir.
.Folder.new .Folder.cur .Folder.tmp
could become:
.Folder__1.new .Folder__1.cur .Folder__1.tmp and .Folder__2.new .Folder__2.cur .Folder__2.tmp
You would only need to split "cur", unless you expect someone to get over 10,000 new message waiting. "tmp" is only used _whilst_ message are being delivered, so mail clients don't see a partially written message.
This could be further extended so that Dovecot could be configured to store 'old' message folders in a separate location. We could then have slower+cheaper+larger storage mounted so that 'old mail' does not take up the expensive local SCSI disks on the machine. Mail from 2 years ago is much less likely to be accessed than mail from the last week.
Also, instead of __N, you could try a different path, so /foo/bar/User/ is for new mail, and /old/slow/disk/User is for older stuff.
This would provide very neat behind-the-scenes archiving functionality.
There's really two ideas here... one is the mechanism of multi-directory folders, the other is the policy of separating by age.
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net