[geeks] Maildir with postfix

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 21 Jan 2010, Mark Benson wrote:

> Also if you corrupt a mbox mailbox so it's not readable you lose the lot
> (as we found out to our cost), whereas a Maildir structure is per-file
> so corruption isolated to individual messages.

...unless your filesystem craps on the directory.  Most modern filesystems
don't have a problem coping with large directories, but it wasn't that
long ago that directories with large numbers of entries were problematic.

> Maildir really doesn't have many limits other than the available storage
> and the filesystem limits it's installed on.

Same with mbox, although random access to Maildir is much faster unless
your IMAP daemon implements a index for mbox (after which, mbox is faster
and more compact than Maildir).  If mbox had an inter-message separator
that gave the size of the next message (rather than relying on /^From /),
it'd be nearly perfect.

> It does breed a lot of small file, but that was something I was willing
> to fly with.

Beware of running low on inodes if your mail storage is Large.  I'd
recommend a separate filesystem for your Maildirs, with high inode
density.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Science is what we understand well enough to explain
Elgin, TX         (   to a computer.  Art is everything else we do."
USA                )                                    --Dr. Donald Knuth