[Dovecot] direct access or local IMAP access?

[Wouter Van Hemel]

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.