Alternative (raw) message store (i.e. instead of maildir)

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Vladimir Marek
<Vladimir.Marek at oracle.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have objections against maildir too,

    Just for the record I have nothing against maildir (or at least
when compared to mbox format). On the contrary I find it quite easy to
fiddle with...

    My problem with it is that it doesn't scale... And I don't mean
this in a theoretical sense, I mean it in the concrete one: I have
about 661k emails... And a single `notmuch sync` takes a few tens of
seconds...

    (Of course my problem could be partially solved by moving to a
fanout maildir folder, i.e. multiple maildirs. But this doesn't solve
the scalability it just delays the problem...)


> but I tried to tackle it from
> different perspective. Store the maildir in zip file and use fuse-zip to
> manage it. It works sort of but it has two major disadvantages:

    I also thought of using either FUSE or 9p for this. Unfortunately
it doesn't quite solve my issue as seen above...


    Now about other hacks to my problem:
    * I'm aware that I can feed notmuch with individual file paths to
be indexed, but it still needs a path where to find an email;
    * use the before mentioned fanout solution;
    * others?

    But regardless, having 600k emails on my disk (currently in the
same folder) is insane... Moreover I would have loved to be able to
use some Git plumbing as a store, or maybe CouchDB, etc...

    Ciprian.