On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Joe Garcia wrote:
> So I need a good directory hashing algorithim beyond last/first name for
> example.
>
> Maildir is located under the users home directory. I want their homedir location
> to be something that would distribute the load more evenly, instead of something
> like /home/smith/joe/Maildir.
What I came up with some time ago was a hash of the first three characters
of the username, which could be a-z0-9. Cases where the username wasn't
long enough, or there was a "bad" character in the first three, it's
replaced or padded out with an infrequently used letter, like "q" or "x",
e.g.
user "jsmith" would hash out to /maildrop/j/s/m/jsmith
user "a1" would hash out to /maildrop/a/1/x/ae
user "x-ray" would hash out to /maildrop/x/x/r/x-ray
jms
