Out of Topic: IMAP

[Bob Jones]

Thus spake Richard Frovarp, with impeccable timing on 2/8/2007 10:26 AM:
> 
> We run IMAP and use mbx format. There are occasional issues when the 
> index is corrupted, but there are tools to fix it. Using mbx over 
> maildir prevents the system from having to read n files for the required 
> information, where n is the number of messages in the folder. As you 
> might expect n can grow to be quite large.

While this may be true in UW-IMAP (not sure, never tried maildir with 
it), if you use something like dovecot that has an index cache of each 
mailbox, the system only has to read all those individual files once to 
create the cache.  In fact, if you use the LDA that comes with dovecot, 
when the message is delivered it is added to the index automatically, so 
the filesystem never has to worry about reading all those individual 
files, just each one as the client accesses to actually read the mail.

Also, even if you are using mbox format, I highly recommend dovecot as 
it blows the doors off of UW even with that format.

Bob