[Mailman-Developers] Speaking about kitties (or archivers)

[Patrick Ben Koetter]

* Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org>:
> On Jun 02, 2012, at 07:19 AM, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:
> 
> >Maildir is robust but it doesn't scale under high load. You can add indexes,
> >but they are limited sooner or later too. 
> >
> >Concerning mailbox formats Timo Sirainens current approach to collect a
> >limited number of messages in one file and then start a new one combines the
> >best of both worlds - mbox and maildir - in mdbox
> ><http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/dbox>. 
> >
> >Con
> >It takes an index to know in which files a message is located.
> >
> >Pro
> >A magnitude faster to backup, which I would keep an eye on because mailing
> >list archives tend to be large and backing up a directory of small files is a
> >well known performance killer.
> >
> >I can get you in contact with Timo if you like to.
> 
> I've chatted with him a few times (I'm a Dovecot user and fan).

+1

> Would someone like to take a crack at implementing this format either in, or
> on top of, the Python stdlib mailbox module:
> 
> http://docs.python.org/library/mailbox.html
> 
> I'd much rather use something standard (and maintained by someone else!) than
> a bunch of custom code specific to Mailman.

Speaking of standards. I discussed this with Timo in private mail and he
suggests not to use mdbox directly. It is still under development and he
thinks it should not become a standard format like mbox or maildir.

To quote Timo from our conversation:

  I'd prefer using mdbox via Dovecot itself, either via LMTP or dovecot-lda or
  maybe by adding some "doveadm save" command. Anything else I think would be
  problematic. Even using Dovecot's library for accessing mdbox would be
  problematic in some installations if you didn't also read several settings
  from dovecot.conf (e.g. lock_method).

  Note: The "'doveadm save' command" above refers to an idea where dovecot
  would import to be archived messages from a MM3 mailing list into Dovecot
  (and whatever format has been definded for the mailbox).

Maybe - and to pick up an idea Barry had mentioned to me a long time ago about
mailing list management directly from a mail client - we would gain the most
if we implemented an LMTP client as archiver (better: archive transport).

This would introduce the chance to choose among many LMTP servers and their
specific, optimized storage format (Dovecot -> mdbox, Cyrus IMAP -> ?)
including their servers various IMAP SEARCH capabilities for searches in
archives.

p at rick


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