On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Richard Welty wrote:
> first, you need to consider how you are storing your mail spool.
> there are three approaches that i'm familiar with.
>
> 1) monolithic mailboxes in /var/spool or /var/mail
>
> 2) maildirs -- either in user home directories or in central spools,
>
> 3) proprietary mail stores -- there are a couple of these kicking around,
> at least one should not be rejected out of hand.
You also need to consider whether the mailboxes are indexed or not. The
usual reason for type (3) message stores is that they rely heavily on the
indexes and require them to be consistent. However another approach (taken
by Dovecot) is to augment a traditional mailbox with an index which can
cope with inconsistencies (e.g. caused by mail delivery) and which can
easily be reconstructed when necessary. Indexes massively improve the
performance and scalability of a message store.
I wrote a longer analysis of these issues for last year's UKUUG winter
conference:
http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~fanf2/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/
Tony.
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