[imp] Direct Maildir Access

[Greg Swift]

> What would be the benefits of direct maildir access?

Taken from SquirellMail's Wiki page regarding Maildir (written by Gavin):

"I believe direct maildir support would cost less than 5% of the 
overhead incurred by initiating an IMAP session (these are "heavy" 
processes), performing some action, and ending the session (i.e. 
non-persistent IMAP sessions)"

One benefit would be that if you were offering a webmail only system, 
you wouldn't need to bother with the task of setting up a POP/IMAP 
server at all, but even if you provided POP/IMAP access as well, you are 
able to eliminate the load generated by POP/IMAP processes related to 
providing the webmail interface.  I currently run the later on my 
personal server, but almost none of the users use anything except the 
webmail, so the IMAP is pretty much pointless, except that it HAS to be 
there.  While on my work systems I also run webmail and POP access from 
the same system (once again, IMAP a theoretically unnecessary layer 
because the only time it is used is for webmail).

On my personal mail I am still runing on an old system, using mbox 
support and pine is amazing compared to IMP for access to that mailbox.  
This mailbox is around 500MB in size.  Yes, I realize that there is no 
webui to load, but there is such a significant difference that I have to 
believe the IMAP layer is part of the problem.

Then at work, I have a 900MB mailbox that I serve via IMAP.  I've broken 
my IMAP server when trying to access it via IMP for more than just quick 
check of my inbox, while it doesnt happen often I never have problems w/ 
IMAP otherwise.  I've used Evolution and Thunderbird to access the same 
mailbox for a while, and while they both seem to crumble on occasion, 
the latest version of Thunderbird (1.5) seems to be the only graphical 
client I've used in the FS/OS world that can handle the size/number of 
folders.  Outlook could probably handle it, but I won't use it, and is 
not the point of this letter.

I realize that many people say, "well if you are having performance 
issue use IMAPProxy", but then you are adding ANOTHER layer.  And 
IMAPProxy is more useful in cases where maildir access would not be 
applicable anyways.

-greg