On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 02:28:46PM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > And of course the simple solution is to migrate to mbox. Maildir was > created for a single purpose: to eliminate file locking contention on > the traditional UNIX single mbox file. With tens of thousands of emails > this is obviously an archival workload. As such you don't have the > locking issues. Header and body searches are many times faster with > mbox than with maildir. The only operation that is significantly slower > is deleting an email. I'll assume mutt uses mmap to access mbox files, > so large file sizes shouldn't be a problem.
Thank you for your response, Stan. The reason why I moved to Maildir is because I started using notmuch for indexing and searching my e-mail. Now, I could maintain two copies: one for general access and the other for notmuch indexing, but that's rather inefficient and I'd have to sync them somehow. > FWIW, I have some 100K+ emails, mostly list mail, in a couple dozen > active mbox files. Full body searching is relatively quick on a file > containing 20K emails and on a gzipped file containing 17K+ emails, even > with stale FTS indexes in both cases. These mbox mails are stored on a > Dovecot server w/dual 550MHz CPUs, 384MB RAM, with a single effective > 7.2K SATA spindles--pretty old and slow hardware. mbox performance is > more than acceptable. Agreed. I'll see if there is a way by which I can have the best of both worlds. My usual solution (even with mboxes) was to use formail to split the messages to several mail directories on a per month basis, such as 2013_08, 2013_07 … 2005_06 etc. I'll see if that helps. Thanks. Kumar -- mar...@bdsi.com (no longer valid - where are you now, Martin?) -- from /usr/src/linux/drivers/cdrom/mcd.c -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130818040056.ga17...@bluemoon.alumni.iitm.ac.in