[Dovecot] Spliting Folders for Efficiency

[Daniel Watts]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 10:00 +0100, Daniel Watts wrote:
> 
>> .Folder__1.new
>> .Folder__1.cur
>> .Folder__1.tmp
>> and
>> .Folder__2.new
>> .Folder__2.cur
>> .Folder__2.tmp
>>
>> with Dovecot merging them before display as just "Folder" within the 
>> mail client.
> 
> Virtual folders would enable this, if they're implemented one day..
> 
>> This could be further extended so that Dovecot could be configured to 
>> store 'old' message folders in a separate location. We could then have 
>> slower+cheaper+larger storage mounted so that 'old mail' does not take 
>> up the expensive local SCSI disks on the machine. Mail from 2 years ago 
>> is much less likely to be accessed than mail from the last week.
> 
> dbox format will support this soon. So that you can configure two (or
> more) directories for it and then Dovecot will look up the mail files
> from each of them in order. It would also support automatically moving
> non-recently accessed mails to the slower dirs.
> 
> The current dbox implementation in v1.1 supports only
> one-message-per-file mode so it's quite similar to maildir. The main
> problem with implementing fast/slow storage for maildir is that the
> maildir filenames change all the time, so it would waste the slow
> storage's I/O all the time when trying to figure out if a file is there
> or not. dbox doesn't have this problem.
> 

Hi Timo!
Digging up this thread from 2007. Just had another conversation in my 
company about how to spread old non-accessed files to cheaper slower 
storage.

Is this now feasible? I noticed dbox is now v2.0 but see no reference to 
virtual folders or auto-archiving etc.

Hope you're having a good time State-side!

Best wishes,
Dan