i am considering changing my mailbox format from maildir to mdbox. the reason for this is mainly, b/c i have (a) multiple large mailboxes with tens of thousands of mail files, and (b) most of these mails files have a size significantly smaller than the sector size of the disk.
so, since the emails themselves are only about nGB large, the disk space used is at least twice as much, if not even three times.
i know, hard disk space is 'cheap', but still...
Also think about iops. rsyncing 10GB of small files takes a lot longer than 10 1GB files.
but then i read at
https://doc.dovecot.org/admin_manual/mailbox_formats/dbox/
the following:
[...] you must not lose the dbox index files, as they can’t be regenerated without data loss.
I have read this also, and was also worried about this, but when I look at the flat m.988 file, I still have quite a lot of useful data there.
Received: from xxxxx (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xxxxxxx (8.15.2/8.15.2) with ESMTPS id 29IAeeZw2293734 (version=TLSv1.3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256 verify=NOT) for <xxxxxxxxxx>; Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:40:40 +0200 X-Virus-Status: Clean X-Virus-Scanned: clamav-milter 0.103.5 at xxxxxxx Received: (from xxxxxx@localhost) by xxxxxxxxxx (8.15.2/8.15.2/Submit) id 29IAeeoF2293733 for xxxxxxx; Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:40:40 +0200 From: xxxxx <xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Message-ID: <202210181040.29IAeeoF2293733@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:40:40 +0200 To: <xxxxxxx> Subject: test User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Received-SPF: neutral (spf not configured)
test
R634e82ab V7e3 G18424b37ab824e63be3a0000fe361dd3 BINBOX