Cyrus does *NOT* use Maildir

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Cyrus does *NOT* use Maildir
by Phoenix on Friday 28/Jan/2005, @16:27

Either the Kolab server is not using Cyrus-IMAP, or the interviewer and developers are not talking about the same thing.

Cyrus-IMAP uses several different database formats for message storage. It does *NOT* use Maildir for message storage.

Courier-IMAP uses the Maildir format, but it does not scale into the thousands of users, or the tens of thousands of messages per folder. Trust me, I've tried.

I have 500 MB of archived mail, with several folders with 15,000+ messages in them. Trying to get this to work on a dual-AthlonMP 2200+ system with 2 GB of RAM was not a lot of fun using Courier-IMAP and Maildir. It would take upwards of 30 seconds to load a message index, and it could take even longer to do operations on multiple messages.

I installed Cyrus-IMAP on this same server, copied my messages over from one setup to the other (using Kontact no less), and haven't had any problems since. Folder indexing and access is in the sub 5 second range on my largest folders (just under 20,000 messages to date), and doing operations on multiple messages takes no time at all.

So, are the Kolab poeple using Courier-IMAP and Maildir, or are they using Cyrus-IMAP and database storage for messages????

Related Links

·   Articles on Interviews
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Re: Cyrus does *NOT* use Maildir
by Steffen Hansen on Friday 28/Jan/2005, @17:37

I believe that the interviewer means that Cyrus IMAP stores messages as files in the filesystem -- just like MailDir.

But you are right that Cyrus does not use MailDir. It uses it's own storage format which is basically this: One file per message, filename is the IMAP UID of the message. In addition to that, metadata/indexes/etc are stored in small binary databases (skiplists, berkeley dbs etc...). The important issue here is that the message contents is not put one big blob somewhere.

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Re: Cyrus does *NOT* use Maildir
by Phoenix on Saturday 29/Jan/2005, @14:38

Aha. That makes sense.

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Re: Cyrus does *NOT* use Maildir
by Martin Konold on Monday 31/Jan/2005, @18:11

FYI: My company has all email stored on a Pentium III - 550 MHz, 256 MB RAM Kolab 2 server using an encrypted filesystem on a venerable 3Ware based RAID-1.

My personal email alone is 4773 MB spread across 580.000 messages.

Sofar the performance of Kolab2 or Kontact is not an issue at all!

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