On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 14:18 +0100, Alan Brown wrote: > This is something Timo hacked up for me a few years ago and I realised > should be on the list in case anyone else wants them. > > The following patches will limit maildir folders to 4000 messages on > Dovecot 2.0.* and 2.1.* > > The Specfile patch is against the Cityfan Redhat EL5 SRPM but is likely > to work on most build platforms > > Changing the message limit requires a recompile. It's brutal and ugly > but it prevents users overloading FSes that can't cope with huge numbers > of files (EG: GFS2)
Perhaps you should try mdbox some day? Another related thing someone asked about was about making kind of an "alt storage" to Maildir by keeping new mails in new/ and older mails in cur/. So that if the Maildir has like 1M messages Dovecot would only very rarely need to scan/modify cur/ because most of the changes would happen in new/.
