dovecot - Oct 2004 - direct access or local IMAP access?

Hello,

Thanks to much help from Timo Sirainen, I now have a running dovecot on 
my Mac, that works great both with mutt and Mail.app.

I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for 
1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of 
performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir 
hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.

Thanks a lot,

Alan Schmitt

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
.O.
..O
OOO
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On 22.10.2004, at 13:47, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for
> 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of
> performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the 
> maildir
> hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
Probably depends on how fast your mail client is at accessing mailboxes 
directly compared to Dovecot.

 From Dovecot's point of view external modifications only make Dovecot 
rescan the mailbox to find out changes. With Maildir Dovecot does it 
pretty much constantly anyway so it shouldn't afftect performance much 
if at all. It doesn't affect stability.
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On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Thanks to much help from Timo Sirainen, I now have a running dovecot on
> my Mac, that works great both with mutt and Mail.app.
>
> I'm going to have a lot of mail stored there (about 40000 messages for
> 1.4GB in 30 folders), and I was wondering if it was better (in terms of
> performance and stability) to directly access the mail using the maildir
> hierarchy, or access it using local IMAP.
>
If you only use one program, let's say dovecot, programs can't start 
fighting each other with little incompatabilities and conflicts (such as 
starting to add or change implementation-specific headers). Shouldn't, but 
you never know. And you can take advantage of indexes without having to 
rescan the mails because the status of some messages changed unexpectedly.

On the other hand, most mail clients cache imap messages, and you might 
end up with a large cache (and thus a lot more of disk usage). So you 
probably should pick your mail client wisely, to avoid having (some of) 
the same data twice on the same disk.