[Dovecot] bidirectional synchronization of dovecot-managed maildirs

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Tue Dec 28 16:12:30 EET 2004


On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 12:13 +0100, James Leifer wrote:
> While I'm asking this: how difficult would it be to have multiple
> physical maildir directories be presented by dovecot as a single IMAP
> folder?  The reason I ask is that many file systems start to slow down
> noticably once one gets more than about 5000 files in a directory.
> (Reiser is an exception, but reiser has had other problems of
> reliability for me.)  It would be nice to be able to spread a single
> folder out over several maildirs to reduce any possible problems from
> the file system.

Don't pretty much all Linux filesystems handle this well already? Even
ext3 is fast nowadays with htree enabled.

This isn't really maildir anymore, maybe rather have a completely new
mail store format. I'll probably build one somewhat soon, featuring:

 - keep message flags, UIDs and other metadata in Dovecot indexes
 - 1..n messages in a single file, eg. 1MB limit per file (unless a
single message itself is larger)
 - expunging in the middle of file would move the following messages to
new file, so it can't get corrupted
 - no locks needed for reading

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