Dovecot, pigeonhole and hardlinks

[Gionatan Danti]

Il 03-01-2020 19:51 @lbutlr ha scritto:
> On 03 Jan 2020, at 06:16, Gionatan Danti <g.danti at assyoma.it> wrote:
>> What surprises me is that hard-linking identical messages saves so 
>> much space, yet nobody seems to asking/using such feature.
>> So, either a) few cares about saving space or b) few are using the 
>> pigeonhole plugin. And both a) and b) seems unlikely...
> 
> Or
> 
> c) we see nearly no truly identical messages.

Well, sure, this is another possibility.

However, on all mailserver which I manage, a significant portion of 
total emails are messages sent to groups/lists rather than single 
recipient. Cyrus and other proprietary mailservers (eg: CommuniGate Pro) 
use unix shared storage (aka hardlink) to avoid copying the message to 
multiple inboxes. This is especially valuable when a) large groups 
exists or b) a large message is sent to groups/lists.

Please also note that, when not using Pigeonhole, Dovecot *does* use 
hardlink for messages sent to multiple recipients and/or groups. It is 
only when Pigeonhole is active that the hardlinking does not happen.

Thanks.

-- 
Danti Gionatan
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