Help with Dovecot, Postfix and whacky results. [solved]

[Rashkae]

Daevid Vincent wrote:

> I even got Roundcube (which is really neat!) to work and Atmail Open (after
> some hacking of the login page).
> 
> I thought about using "Maildir/" at this juncture, but I have 10 years worth
> of mail in mbox format and I was worried about converting and all that. I
> figure I'll fight one fire now and maybe when I do a re-install to Ubuntu
> 9.10 or something I'll re-investigate mail again. Don't fix what ain't broke
> right? I did try to get the /var/spool/mail/%u to be in /home/%u/Mailbox but
> it started to be a pain with EXPORT and all sorts of other "non-default"
> settings so I just backed it out. It did give me a greater understanding of
> how all of this works and is layed out. Thanks to everyone who added some
> insight.
> 
> http://daevid.com 

Maildir allows you to move / delete messages between mailboxes without
re-writing the entire spool file.  This should have obvious advantages
in multi-user setups since users re-writing 100's of megabytes, (i've
even got people with well over 2GB mail folders) would obviously bring
the server IO to it's knees in no time.  It should also be much easier
to create incremental backups with maildir format.

But there is almost no advantage to single user, since the re-writing of
the mail file should happen neatly in the background.  And indeed, the
old mbox format is much faster for such activities as searching your
e-mail (if you are actually searching the contents of the message bodies.)