From: Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] general advice sought Message-ID: <1315830847.7326.48.camel@hurina> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-15"

On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 13:11 +0100, Alan Brown wrote:

...

I'd like to hear the thoughts of list members on which type of storage method seems "best" for inboxes and for folders.

The filesystem is GFS2 and for various reasons I can't change it. .. If I migrate to other formats (eg mdbox), then it needs to be able to be done on the fly. (Taking the mailservers down for a day won't go down well, even an hour raises howls).

Have you had any trouble with Dovecot's index files in your current setup? Any errors at all?

Zero. The issues which have arisen are:

1: Really slow access to messages in large folders (GFS2 issue)

2: Users trashing their inbox then demanding we drop everything to restore "all my important mail"

If not, I'd think mdbox will work fine. You can do it incrementally per-user (and you really should try it first with only a few users). http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Dsync explains how to do it on the fly.

I thought so too, just wanted to hear opinions on doing it vs other approaches. :)