On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Hans du Plooy wrote:
Hi guys,
I've been following this mailing list since SUSE 8.0 came out, and have kept every single mail. I know that might sound excessive, but having my own copy of at least a piece of "the archives" has helped more than a couple of times when connectivity isn't available.
Currently I have all my mail stashed in ~/Maildir - courier-imap gives me access to it. Nice setup as I can chop&change between mail clients any time I like.
However, the sheer volume of mail is becoming a problem. It's getting slower and slower, searches through mail folders take for ever and max out my CPU for minutes at a time.
I was wondering if there's a better way to store my mail?
OK. For 95% of people's purposes, courier-imap ROCKS. It's fast[1],
stable, fairly well supported, and "It Just Works". However, my note,
[1] is that it's fast until you get large mailboxes. Sam Varshavchik
(sp?) is the author of courier-imap, and he feels it's the filesystem's
problem if your very large mailbox is slow. courier-imap does NO
CACHING whatsoever. So, so scan a mailbox with 10,000 entries for
anything (any kind of searching or sorting at all), every single email
must be opened and read at least partially.
Enter dovecot. "Mostly" compatible with courier-imap, it uses little
databases of information "about" individual emails (aka, meta data),
like subject, date, author, etc...
Give dovecot a try. THere is a wiki entry for doing just that on the
dovecot wiki.
Either that, or
a) throw hardware at it
b) split the mailbox up
--
Carpe diem - Seize the day.
Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants!
Jon Nelson