[Dovecot] Plan/Status of MBX support?

[Jiaying Xu]

Hi, All,

I've been happy user of dovocot as far. It is easy to 
configure, reliable and secure. Hat off to all developers 
who make this possible!

I know dovecot is on the mailbox format front, it supports 
both mbox and maildir format well, and is developing and 
experimenting a new flexible format, dbox.

But is there any plan to add mbx (i.e., indexed mbox 
format) support, to complete the set?

There is some circumstance that mbox format is chosen over 
the mordern maildir format, For example in our situation, 
we receive many, many small messages and it would be 
expensive to create so many files with maildir. And we do 
a lot of searching - again a single mbox is faster in 
searching.

Now the problem is, we have to use the tranditional mbox 
format with dovecot, as it does not support indexed mbox 
format, which makes deleting messages costly. Also the 
long-time file locking (due to the slow operation on the 
dovecot side) causes our MTA (exim, by the way) holds a 
huge queue. That drives up the system load to mad (load 
average above 500 is not unusual in our case).

If dovecot support index mbox format, we be in the havean! 
But is there a plan to add this support in the near 
future?

Thanks,

JY