Dear Timo,
Would there be any sense in giving Dovecot the option to split folders
into multiple subfolders when they reached a specified size (probably
message count) limit?
Dovecot would monitor folders and when they reached, say, 10,000
messages, silently split the folder on the filesystem to ensure that
access remains fast.
I know that Dovecot scales very well but this would give practically
unlimited storage capability and also keep things fast. You could even
have it so that the latest 100 messages are kept in their own folder for
fast access.
.Folder.new
.Folder.cur
.Folder.tmp
could become:
.Folder__1.new
.Folder__1.cur
.Folder__1.tmp
and
.Folder__2.new
.Folder__2.cur
.Folder__2.tmp
with Dovecot merging them before display as just "Folder" within the
mail client.
This could be further extended so that Dovecot could be configured to
store 'old' message folders in a separate location. We could then have
slower+cheaper+larger storage mounted so that 'old mail' does not take
up the expensive local SCSI disks on the machine. Mail from 2 years ago
is much less likely to be accessed than mail from the last week.
This would provide very neat behind-the-scenes archiving functionality.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Best,
Daniel
--
Squirrelmail Stable 1.4.8 (and developing on 1.5.2)
PHP 5.x Hardened with Eaccelerator
Apache 2.x
Mysql 5.0.x
Imapproxy over Dovecot 1.0.rc27 with Maildir
all running on Gentoo Linux
for ~5,000 users.
