[Dovecot] zlib plugin

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Sun Oct 5 22:38:02 EEST 2008


On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 21:28 +0200, Luuk wrote:
> hi,
> 
> Could anyone give some info on this plugin?
> When i read the wiki (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Zlib) i'm still 
> left with some questions...
> 
> I use Maildir to store my mails, if i enable this zlib-plugin,
> should i 'manually' compress all messages?
> or wil the uncompressed messages still be accessible by dovecot?
> wil new messages be compressed automagically?

Dovecot can read both compressed and uncompressed messages.

> how should the compressed messages be named?

It doesn't matter from Dovecot's point of view since it detects the
compression by reading the first few bytes of the file. But since you'll
be compressing them manually you should mark them in some way so you
don't compress anything twice (and that would break Dovecot too).

> a message now has the name '1223224520.2783_1.opensuse:2,S'
> how would a compressed message be named?
> ['1223224520.2783_1.opensuse:2,SZ'

This is OK.

>  or '1223224520.2783_1.opensuse:2,S,Z' 

This isn't a valid maildir file name.

> Last but not least, what gain will i have by using this plugin in 
> combination with Maildir, or will it have more impact when mails are 
> stored in mbox.

I guess it depends on the size of your mails. With mboxes it can be used
only with read-only archives, so it's not all that useful. With maildir
it can be used transparently with read-write mailboxes. I've no idea
what the performance difference or space improvements are. I guess
that'll also depend on your system.
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