On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Simon Byrnand wrote: > I checked out courier-imap a while ago and as far as I could see, it didn't > support unix mail spool format mailboxes... (eg all messages in one file)
You're right, it doesn't. Courier is maildir based, which with large mailboxes is a big performance gain - especially if a journalling btree-based filesystem such as Reiserfs is used. (Reiserfs should be a massive win on nntp spools and in mqueue partitions. It's stable, but has some hardware gotchas which need to be watched out for on IDE systems - if your system disables DMA on a piix3 controller, LEAVE IT DISABLED - DMA is hosed on the early piix* chipsets and DMA write errors will result in effectively complete filesystem trashing.) Cyrus (another Imap/pop solution) goes one step further and uses a (effectively proprietary) database format with its own MDA Yes, if you're going to go down this path, you need to stop people using local-spool-reading clients and nfs mounts, but the performance and stability gains are worth it (Not to mention that mail can now be entirely handled on a machine which has _zero_ user shells on it, so can be locked down that much tighter, security-wise...)
