Dovecot: Maildir vs. sdbox vs. mdbox

JustAMacUser

In a few months I'm going to need to setup a mail server and I'm looking for feedback regarding Dovecot's mail storage methods. Alternatives to Dovecot itself are not an option so please limit suggestions and comments to Dovecot experiences. Specifically I am looking for performance (probably on a low end box so RAM, CPU and file size overhead), and future migration potential/challenges between using Maildir, single-dbox or multi-dbox.

I have used Dovecot's Maildir format and it seemed fine, but searching 10K+ messages on the server is not exactly fast (iOS Mail doesn't do a whole lot of local caching, for example). So I'm wondering if using a dbox format would be better and which one.

The server will only have a handful of users and domains, but probably 50K+ messages or more (stored on it, received daily/monthly will not be all that high).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

tortau

You could use Solr for indexing Dovecot.

More details: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Solr

If you plan to run the Debian/Ubuntu variant, there is a package for it:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=dovecot-solr