Sorry to insist, but the process you describe (copy up to 1GB (why ? I still do not understand) ) is exactly the "sdbox" approach (one file per message in each IMAP subfolder)
Let's please spend some more analysis on this. On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 00:45:29 +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote: > With maildir, single-dbox or multi-dbox when you copy a message, just about nothing is read from disk and very little is written to disk. For example in Maildir case a copy is the same as doing: > > ln ~/Maildir/.source/cur/1234 ~/Maildir/.dest/cur/1234 > > This only accesses the file's metadata. It would be just as fast for a file of 1 kB or 1 GB. The file contents aren't read at all, only the inode is copied. > > With your idea of multi-dbox-per-mailbox it would actually have to read the 1 kB or 1 GB of data and write the 1 kB or 1 GB of data to another file. Much slower. > > On 6.1.2011, at 0.30, Joan Moreau wrote: > >> I am not sure I understand why it would be "read entirely", as it is the same as reading a message when accessing a folder and writing a file when a new message in arriving.... which is the very most common activity of a mail server... so not sure about any "wasteful" I/O Can we spend some more thoughts on this ? On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 00:17:36 +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote: >> >>> On 6.1.2011, at 0.11, Joan Moreau >> wrote: >> >>>> Is there a way to use the mdbox format (i.e. several >> message per files) for EACH IMAP folders (sdbox approach) ? ctual >> ritten entirely, rather than a) with sdbox it can use a hard link() call, b) with mdbox it can update 3 indexes. Copying is a rather common operation since clients often move messages to Trash, so the extra writing would be a bit wasteful.
