Mailbox and dovcot
- Thread starter jbw
- Start date
hostpc.com
Verified User
No, the purpose of Dovecot is to use Maildir ... it isn't designed to use mbox format.
nobaloney
NoBaloney Internet Svcs - In Memoriam †
Dovecot can be used for either. I really haven't studied the DA conversion script so I don't know what to change in it to continue to use mbox with it.
It would take some customization of the Dovecot installation and some customization of the exim.conf file, but I believe it can be done.
Jeff
It would take some customization of the Dovecot installation and some customization of the exim.conf file, but I believe it can be done.
Jeff
BigWil
Verified User
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2004
- Messages
- 313
Jbw,
But why? Just leave it as is and you can use the mbox. But let me add that mbox is HORRIBLE! Going from Qmail to vm-pop3d has been a complete and utter nightmare. The vm-pop3d itself has the ability to overload the servers. My instincts tell me that going back to Maildir will be a very beautiful thing indeed.
Just look at the simplicity of the situation. One huge 100MB to hold in memory and parse or 5000 20K to parse one at a time. Thats how I see it and so far Maildir comparisons have shown me that that is clearly the case.
I have one machine still running Qmail (over 7 years now). I never hear a peep out of it. No email issues what so ever. But I hear from vm-pop3d almost daily. Exim is a little bit of a hog too might I add but it's tolerable.
Big Wil
But why? Just leave it as is and you can use the mbox. But let me add that mbox is HORRIBLE! Going from Qmail to vm-pop3d has been a complete and utter nightmare. The vm-pop3d itself has the ability to overload the servers. My instincts tell me that going back to Maildir will be a very beautiful thing indeed.
Just look at the simplicity of the situation. One huge 100MB to hold in memory and parse or 5000 20K to parse one at a time. Thats how I see it and so far Maildir comparisons have shown me that that is clearly the case.
I have one machine still running Qmail (over 7 years now). I never hear a peep out of it. No email issues what so ever. But I hear from vm-pop3d almost daily. Exim is a little bit of a hog too might I add but it's tolerable.
Big Wil
Well Dovecot seems to have be a better pop3/imap4 client overall.
Some of the whys. I use wais to search my email, it already have built a reverse index and it can seek to the mail instantly. I use FFS and at least on FFS the opendir/readirectory slow down a lot after a directory gets very large. Also most of my mail files would be much smaller then the min. allocation size so Maildir's waste a lot of space.
You don't hold the whole file in memory at one time. You stream it. On my system at least the time to filter a 100mb file would be less then the time to open and close 5000 smaller files with the same data in them. Also indexes can be built that allow the readers to seek to any message very quickly.
I have one qmail server left myself, that has been running since 97 or so I guess. It is slated to be replaced with a postfix server sometime this year though.
So, I am not unfamilar with using both, and at first I did like Maildir, but now I prefer mbox again. That said I am no where near as anti Maildir as Mark Crispin is. In fact I am not antiMaildir at all actually, but I prefer mbox and since dovecot supports both I wanted to see if they would have DA support both as an user settable option.
So, I want to replace vm-pop3 and uw-imap, but I want to still use Mbox.
Last edited: