Re: [Evolution-hackers] Moving from the single mbox file format for the local folders

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan gnome org>]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 01:25 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
>> It should be rocket fast!. Expunge is just unlink one file. Change of
>> flags etc rewrites just that file when upsync happens. No rewrite 2gb
>> of a file, to expunge 10 mails. Startup/shutdown faster etc etc. I'm a
>> fan of this, what so ever! To overcome 100K mbox files in one folder,
>> distribute under multi-level subdirs and let summary know that.
>
> I'm liking this idea too.
>
> Did you have a scheme in mind for how to partition the mbox files into
> subdirectories?  One possibility might be to use a similar approach as
> CamelDataCache.  That is, take the last two (or three?) digits of the
> MD5 checksum of the Message-ID and file the message into a subdirectory
> of that name.  That should give you a relatively even distribution and
> the mbox file can be easily be located once you have its Message-ID.
>

IIRC Exchange uses a similar thing. Donno if that is CamelDataCache
:-). Its the scheme I'm speaking off.


> Also, we should be careful about using the word "standard" when talking
> about mbox and Maildir.  Neither of these formats are standardized, and
> in fact variations abound among mailer programs.  Certainly we should be
> able to export messages to these formats, however we decide to store
> them internally.
>

Should be easy, appending all the mbox files under multiple dir to one
big thing should get back the old 1 mbox file format per email folder.
We can have tools to do that, not in the GUI I would say.

-Srini