[Dovecot] direct access or local IMAP access?
Hello,
Thanks to much help from Timo Sirainen, I now have a running dovecot on my Mac, that works great both with mutt and Mail.app.
I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
Thanks a lot,
Alan Schmitt
-- The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
On 22.10.2004, at 13:47, Alan Schmitt wrote:
I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
Probably depends on how fast your mail client is at accessing mailboxes directly compared to Dovecot.
From Dovecot's point of view external modifications only make Dovecot rescan the mailbox to find out changes. With Maildir Dovecot does it pretty much constantly anyway so it shouldn't afftect performance much if at all. It doesn't affect stability.
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Hello,
Thanks to much help from Timo Sirainen, I now have a running dovecot on my Mac, that works great both with mutt and Mail.app.
I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
If you only use one program, let's say dovecot, programs can't start fighting each other with little incompatabilities and conflicts (such as starting to add or change implementation-specific headers). Shouldn't, but you never know. And you can take advantage of indexes without having to rescan the mails because the status of some messages changed unexpectedly.
On the other hand, most mail clients cache imap messages, and you might end up with a large cache (and thus a lot more of disk usage). So you probably should pick your mail client wisely, to avoid having (some of) the same data twice on the same disk.
- Wouter Van Hemel (wouter-dovecot@fort-knox.rave.org) wrote:
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Alan Schmitt wrote:
Hello,
Thanks to much help from Timo Sirainen, I now have a running dovecot on my Mac, that works great both with mutt and Mail.app.
I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
If you only use one program, let's say dovecot, programs can't start fighting each other with little incompatabilities and conflicts (such as starting to add or change implementation-specific headers). Shouldn't, but you never know. And you can take advantage of indexes without having to rescan the mails because the status of some messages changed unexpectedly.
On the other hand, most mail clients cache imap messages, and you might end up with a large cache (and thus a lot more of disk usage). So you probably should pick your mail client wisely, to avoid having (some of) the same data twice on the same disk.
Thanks for the advice. I don't think that mutt caches messages. On the other hand, Mail.app (Apple Mail) may keep a local copy of them if it is asked (and I did so on purpose, to use the built-in search feature, and the future Spotlight search for emails). So yes I'm wasting some space, and I don't know yet if it's worth it (I'm still trying to see how the greatness of mutt compares to the integration with the rest of the system of Mail.app).
Alan Schmitt
-- The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen. .O. ..O OOO
participants (3)
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Alan Schmitt
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Timo Sirainen
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Wouter Van Hemel