[MAILBOX-200] Hierarchical folder layout for maildir

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 0.6
• Component/s: maildir
• Environment: Windows 7 Professional 32bit
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Robin Bankhead
• Created: 04/Nov/13 16:07
• Updated: 05/May/22 04:34
• Resolved: 05/May/22 04:34

Description

Propose adding support in maildir for hierarchical on-disk layout of folders, as used by some other MTA/MUAs (Dovecot for example has optional support[1]).

Secondary-, tertiary- etc level subfolders would be represented by an equivalent dir/subdir structure in the filesystem, so e.g.

[maildir].Dir.SubDir

would exist on-disk as

[maildir]/.Dir/SubDir

The motivation is simply to have on-disk layout more closely mirror that of the mailbox folder structure, though it has the additional fringe benefit of relieving the pressure imposed by subdirs-per-dir limits in some filesystems (though it would take a very large mail corpus to be affected by that, I admit).

This simple proof-of-concept patch to MaildirStore.java enables the feature. If this is of interest, I would look to make it a configurable option in mailbox-maildir.properties (which I don't currently know how to do).

[1] http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir#Directory_Structure