[MlMt] discussion topic: IMAP or smart mailbox?

[Bill Cole]

On 14 Jun 2018, at 17:29 (-0400), Randall Meadows wrote:

> (they claim that lots of messages in INBOX slows things down)

That is not implausible. In fact, it makes a lot of sense.

INBOX sees a lot of random-ish single-message churn, making it ideal for 
a file-per-message/directory-per-mailbox storage mechanism (such as 
Maildir+) so that delivery and deletion processes can avoid needing 
exclusive locks on multi-message files. On the other hand, 
file-per-message/directory-per-mailbox storage mechanisms tend to get 
slower as the message count in a mailbox grows, often degrading quite 
ungracefully. For very large message/mailbox ratios, file-per-mailbox 
(e.g. mbox) storage with server-managed indexing is more efficient, as 
long as there isn't a lot of movement of messages out of a mailbox once 
they've gone in.



-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
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