Out of Topic: IMAP

[Richard Frovarp]

Bob Jones wrote:
> 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
>

Quota handling seems to be a little odd in it. It says it doesn't play 
well with file system quotas. The Maildir++ quota seems to be a bit more 
difficult to work with than file system quotas. On first look, I don't 
see any easy way to tell if a user is over quota or support for grace 
periods.