On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 10:00 +0100, Daniel Watts wrote:
.Folder__1.new .Folder__1.cur .Folder__1.tmp and .Folder__2.new .Folder__2.cur .Folder__2.tmp
with Dovecot merging them before display as just "Folder" within the mail client.
Virtual folders would enable this, if they're implemented one day..
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.
dbox format will support this soon. So that you can configure two (or more) directories for it and then Dovecot will look up the mail files from each of them in order. It would also support automatically moving non-recently accessed mails to the slower dirs.
The current dbox implementation in v1.1 supports only one-message-per-file mode so it's quite similar to maildir. The main problem with implementing fast/slow storage for maildir is that the maildir filenames change all the time, so it would waste the slow storage's I/O all the time when trying to figure out if a file is there or not. dbox doesn't have this problem.