Mark Diekhans writes: > Absolutely. maildir doesn't scale beyond a tiny amount of mail. > For a lot of us, mbox is reaching it's limits. This is why I > was musing about an abstraction between an underlying storage > format being a way to scale vm to much larger mail collections.
I am not sure that mbox is that much of a limit, once you figure out how to archive old mail. I keep about 3 months worth of email in my "INBOX" and archive older mail into 3 month quantities of mbox's. Virtual folders then help me combine these mbox's into whatever combinations I want. Virtual folders are definitely your friend here. Mail older than a year or so needs to be "cleaned", throwing out junk, saving important stuff and quickly figuring out what else needs to be kept. I don't yet have good ways of doing it, but I am making some progress. The recent addition of V T search folders is part of that effort. I am also looking at adopting and enhancing various features in Rob's vm-avirtual.el library. Then we have the IMAP folders and external (headers-only) message feature of VM. These already provide a powerful "abstraction layer" but only for IMAP users. Eventually, this kind of thing will also become possible to other forms of external storage: maildir etc. Cheers, Uday
