The advantage in dovecot delivering the mail directly is that the indexes are updated at delivery rather than later scanned when the user checks their mail. Also, sieve scripts work great with dovecot-lda which is how I filter the many lists I am subscribed to.
Another advantage, and one I use, is the ability to use other mailbox formats like sdbox or mdbox (what I'm using) which allows for more efficient folder structures and less moving around of messages. With mdbox the index indicates what is happening with the message and the on-disk message storage remains essentially unchanged. The doveadm command does allow you to convert between formats as well if need be. I use it to export an mbox of spam to use for training spam filters. In my case, I have a little over five million messages (and growing) stored in mdbox format and that seems to be the fastest format for my use case. The mbox format would be an absolute nightmare and Maildir isn't as good as mdbox. That's just for my mailboxes. My other users also have tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands of messages and they also have no issues with that setup. Updating a mailbox with 200,000+ messages is very quick with dovecot indexes. If, each time I accessed the mailbox, the indexes were updated, I would have a major spike in CPU use every time I checked my mail where now, since the indexes are already up to date, there is no spike at all. Those are my reasons for using dovecot-lda rather than some other mail server to do the deliveries. The combination of OpenSMTPD and dovecot running on OpenBSD is superb. This all works perfectly on a simple server I built with a Pentium G640, 8GB of memory, and dual 2.5-inch WD Black drives in a softraid(4) mirror. Bryan -- You received this mail because you are subscribed to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send a mail to: [email protected]
