[Dovecot] Mailbox Hashing

[Justin Krejci]

First off, the website documentation is really good for Dovecot but while
reading I was not able to find anything pertaining to inbox hashing for
Maildirs. I saw plenty about hashing the directories that the user mailboxes
live in but nothing about specifically hashing an individual user's inbox
directory itself.

 

Is there any method for hashing the inbox automatically after say 5,000
messages are stored? Example

 

$Maildir/in/0/message0

$Maildir/in/0/message1

$Maildir/in/0/message2

.

$Maildir/in/0/message4999

$Maildir/in/1/message5000

$Maildir/in/1/message5001

etc

 

 

I am not currently using Dovecot but am interested to know if this is
available or does running with 20,000+ messages in a single inbox not affect
the performance much? I have looked into other file system tuning techniques
such as enabling ext3 dir_index or using ReiserFS (maybe not ReiserFS
anymore). There will likely be 15,000 to 20,000 accounts spread out on one
or more servers using a 6-drive RAID10 setup. Most accounts are not expected
to have high message quantities but there will be lots of concurrent
connections via pop and imap (and webmail imap).

 

Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.