Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 09/08/2011 02:06 PM:
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote: [...]
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast....
mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow.
How do you get to that conclusion? On the one hand dealing with a mbox involves opening two files: index and data. Using index, seek. On the other maildir requires a dirread, the opening a file and a read. If its just the one message, then its probably about the same. I you are reading though a logical mail folder reading each message in turn then compare the overhead of file open to the overhead on a seek on an already open file. Maybe that file is cached so there is no syscall. If I were writing a mail user agent entirely in shell, I'd pick maildir. Dovecot uses mbox. I have over 200 such mboxes in my mail 'catalogue' and there is a dovecot.index.log, dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache for each. I doubt very much that mbox format under Dovecot is slow. "Obsolete"? Not so long as it is used by all the MTAs and MUAs. -- The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free... --Utah Phillips -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org