On Sun, Apr 13, 2014, Russell Miller wrote: > >On Apr 13, 2014, at 10:25 PM, Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote: >> >> In the context of the OP, when mutt tries to deal with a message (e.g., >> deleting, moving to a folder), it can be boatloads faster, since >> handling the message works on a small file which contains just that >> message. Deleting a message from an mbox mailbox, for example, requires >> rewriting the entire changed mbox file to disk (minus the deleted message). >> Deleting a message from a Maildir mailbox is just removing one file from >> a directory. > >HOWEVER. When a directory grows too large, the OS can take a long time to >seek through the directory, which can cause its own set of problems. And >this makes cleaning out a maildir directory selectively a real pain. >Maildir really could do with a hashing mechanism. We have been using Maildir with courier-imap for decades, and haven't had an issue with this. My security folder typically has 25,000+ messages for the last 7 days messages, and accessing either with IMAP or directly with mutt isn't a problem. I have written various scripts over the years to convert from various mail storage formats ranging from SCO's horrible ctrl-a delimited through the U.W. IMAP, and ones that query other IMAP servers to convert their folder structures to local Maildir. Maildir is generally very easy to handle with standard *nix command line tools. We have moved mail servers for some regional ISPs by rsync'ing with tens of thousands of email customers by rsync'ing from the old server to the new one to get the bulk of the mail across before cutting over to the new machine. Then we shut the old server down, change the DNS to point to the new one, and finally do a new rsync --delete to update the new machine. There's a period where some deleted messages may reappear on the client's email before the rsync is complete, but all new messages appear immediately. Bill -- INTERNET: bill at celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way Voice: (206) 236-1676 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820 Fax: (206) 232-9186 Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792 Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous. -- Will Rogers