Re: Scalable Mail solution with NAS

[Eric Sobocinski <sobo () cisco com>]

At 11:06 AM -0500, 01/31/2001, Sebastien Berube wrote:
> One way to fix this
> issue would be to use a hashing scheme to split the amount of actual
> mailboxes into a subdirectory structure.  You could get something like
>
> johndoe () yourdomain com would have his mailbox in
>
> /export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox
>
> so in /export/mailboxes, in order to find the j directory, you only have
> about 36 directories entries or so.
>
> Although this example is not good in the case where you accept usernames
> with 3 or less characters.

It's not hard to right-pad any short usernames before hashing.  For 
instance, the username "bo" might hash as "bo__" and thus would end up in 
the directory "/export/mailboxes/b/o/_/_/bo.mbox".  If you allow 
non-alphanumerics you'll want to translate those to something innocuous as 
well, or a name such as "bo.lee" will cause problems.