On Wednesday 23 May 2007, Tim wrote: > On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 13:26 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > > > > I think the problem is that /var/spool/mail/* on the desktop > > has become too large. > > A common problem with using IMAP is that people leave all their mail in > their inbox, and something has a hard time dealing with the mass. > Whether that be the client or the server. > That's why creating and using imap folders is essential to efficient use. > It is generally best to move mail out of the inbox at some time or > other, and purge the inbox (some clients only ever *mark* mail to be > deleted, and require manual or scheduled purging). > KMail's expiry is efficient, if carefully set up, using the option to protect messages marked with an Important flag. > The non-inbox mail folders a user creates are usually stored within > their own homespace (though an IMAP server could be configured to keep > them all somewhere in /var). For some systems, keeping them separate is > an advantage (users fill their own spaces, and only cause themselves > problems if they overdo it). > > > Does one really have to keep email in mbox format in this directory > > if running an IMAP server? > > Is IMAP incompatible with maildir format? > > No. You can use whatever schemes your IMAP server supports. That's > configured by the server, the client doesn't care how, or where, the > server stores the mail. Just don't confuse things by using the client > to directly access the files that the IMAP server serves, always use > IMAP. > > I've only played with Dovecot IMAP on FC4, and with mbox storage being > used. I didn't succeed at trying other schemes or Dovecot on later > versions of Fedora - it didn't start up. I haven't put a great deal of > effort into that, though. I have to, sometime soon, as FC4 is past the > end of its life, and the mail server's creaking hideously slowly. I've > heard it said that Dovecot is better with maildir, and I can see that > it'd definitely awful with mbox and a lot of mail. > That's why I moved from mbox to maildir. It's not only bad in dovecot, it's bad even when used directly stored on the local machine. The very nature of it means that large numbers of messages make very large files that have to be read and re-written every time the file is accessed. Horrible. I've been using dovecot on an FC4 server for a long time and it has been magnificent. Like you, I'm facing the need to change the server very soon. Anne
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