[Dovecot] Large Mailbox Slow

[Matt]

> Doubt if there is any answer to this but will ask anyway.  Have a few
> pop3 accounts with thousands of messages.  Its slow when checking
> email naturally.  Are there any tweaks to speed it up?  I imagine
> there is an exchange of the message and header list which is the slow
> down.  Too bad the list could not be compressed with gzip or something
> first.  I think http has an option similar to that.
>
> Just asking.
>

I am running Maildir format on CentOS 5.x 64bit with Ext3 on raid1.
Often wander if Ext4 would have been better.