[Dovecot] New mailbox format

[Todd Vierling]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, dean gaudet wrote:

> > To address the situation you want, readonly archival, my vision would be a
> > compressed maildir (or equivalent), using each mail as a separately
> > compressed entry.  Zip is a pretty good format for this purpose.  Though
> > per-file compression is typically only about half as efficient as whole-mbox
> > compression, you'd have much faster search and retrieval if the file entries
> > had their own compression dictionaries.
>
> so basically it's a classic tradeoff:  speed vs. space... if you design
> with mbox instead of maildir then you get to decide where to set the
> tradeoff... whereas if you use compressed maildir you've given up on space
> immediately.  (and i'm not so convinced you get any speed, because i find
> maildirs with 100000 entries to be a total dog.)

By a Zip-compressed maildir, I'm referring to a zipfile with each message as
a *zip entry*, not a physical file.  Think "zip up a maildir into a single
zipfile" and you'll get very close to the concept I'm trying to describe.

That sort of thing is much faster at entry retrieval than a monolithic
stream-compressed container.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com> <todd at vierling.name>