[Dovecot] direct access or local IMAP access?

[Alan Schmitt]

* Wouter Van Hemel (wouter-dovecot at 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
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