I am doing research before deployment of a Postfix + Dovecot HA cluster tomorrow morning, on converting existing mailboxes to Maildir format. The existing mail server is running Sendmail + Unidentified POP3 on a Fedora Core 2 box. It’s ancient and that’s why my client need it to be scrapped or turned into something else.
Maildir will certainly help a lot in improving performance and avoiding the need to think about mailbox slowness and lock-ups that is a normal problem with mbox.
As an avid Thunderbird user since the project was started years ago and since Firefox 3 have just been released, I can’t avoid wondering whether Thunderbird is considering adding an option for Maildir storage in version 3. Of course, this have no relation whatsoever with the servers mentioned above. For those who are unfamiliar with Thunderbird, it currently store mailboxes in the mbox format.
Searching high and low for an answer, I don’t see any mention of Maildir, anywhere. However Thunderbird 3 looks promising in terms of feel and usability. Mac users will be very happy that Thunderbird 3 is a native Cocoa application and integration will be better. Other platforms will have to make peace with Gecko 1.9.
I’m too lazy to become a tester this time around so I am just going to wait. What about you?
