On Mar 3, 2005, at 7:39 AM, JD Runyan wrote:Cyrus' mail storage has all the advantages that they have mentioned for maildir, and I think a few more.
However, Cyrus' mail store is only accessible via cyrus-imap. Maildirs are usable by a number of mail clients, directly writable by a number of MTAs and MDAs (i.e., postfix, procmail), and several alternative IMAP servers (dovecot, courier).
Honestly, if I am building a mail server, I don't care so much about reading/writing the mailbox directly. I do care that they are files that I can manage with standard UNIX tools.
So, one can argue that you get more choice with Maildirs.
There is a cost for that choice. As you state below, there is no indexing. To be competitive in with the big boys, you must be able to speed things up.
Now, after having poked around for a while in a cyrus mail server, I did notice one very very interesting thing. Cyrus uses the Maildir idea (each message in its own file, folders containing both messages and folders), but implemented in its own way, and with binary indexes built of all the mailboxes for faster searching. I learned this when I found that you can rebuild the indexes from the raw messages if there is index corruption.
Cyrus is fast, presumably because of the pre-indexed messages in a binary db format (likely BerkeleyDB).
Since it is open source, they present their choice, but support multiple database formats.
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