[Dovecot] Plan/Status of MBX support?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 15:42 +0100, Jiaying Xu wrote:
> 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?

Not by me at least. I don't really see a need for it other than helping
conversion from UW-IMAP.

But is "indexed mbox format" really a proper name for mbx? It's in no
way compatible with mbox format and I wouldn't even call it "indexed".

> 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. 

I'm not exactly sure why deleting messages with mbx is any less costly,
because it works practically the same way as with mbox: moving all data
after deleted data over the deleted data.

> 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).

dbox should work nicely for that situation. :) It doesn't lock files for
reading, writing new mails don't block other writes and expunges should
be pretty fast. It finally even seems to be working in latest CVS
version, but I guess it still needs a bit more testing before I'd
recommend using it..
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