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

[Stewart Smith]

Vladimir Marek <Vladimir.Marek at Oracle.COM> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I have objections against maildir too, 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:

huh... this is fairly interesting.... one of the downsides of a million
odd files for mail is that filesystem dump and restore takes a *LOT*
longer than if it's just giant files on disk. Combined with afuse (fuse
automounter) this could be a pretty elegant solution to the problem of
storing archival Maildirs.

One large archival maildir here went from 6.5GB (du -sh on XFS) to a
2.3GB ZIP archive.... that will never, ever change. Think about the
performance difference between creating 560,000 files for backup/restore
versus copying a single 2.3GB file.

>  - fuse zip stores all changes in memory until unmounted
>  - fuse zip (and libzip for that matter) creates new temporary file when
>    updating archive, which takes considerable time when the archive is
>    very big.

This isn't much of a hastle if you have maildir per time period and
archive off. Maybe if you sync flags it may be...

> Of course this solution would have some disadvantages too, but for me
> the advantages would win. At the moment I'm not sure if I want to
> continue working on that. Maybe if there would be more interested guys

I'm *really* tempted to investigate making this work for archived
mail. Of course, the list of mounted file systems could get insane
depending on granularity I guess...

-- 
Stewart Smith
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