Well, I am facing storage problem. The main reason for that is mailing lists that sends huge attachments. Don't you have same problem ? Ok, I thought of solving my problem in a new way using qmail + maildrop + maildir++. Let me know what do you think of that. The idea is simple and only a local delivery agent will be modified ( possibly maildrop ). Here are the steps.

1- Maildrop search of a mailing list header and if exists continue to step 2 otherwise deliver the message normally. 2- Calculate the MD5 sum of the message. 3- Check for the existance of a file at a path like /shared/some/direcotory/hasing/path/using/md5sum/ 4- If the file does not exist then create it and write the email message to this file, otherwise leave it as it is. 5- Locate the maildir of the user and apply the filtering rules as usual , but instead of writing the mail in the maildir just link the file in of step 3 to a file in the maildir where the link follows the naming convention of maildir++. 6- That's it :)

Ok, This way we will have a single copy of each email and hard links in the users maildirs, isn't it great ? The problems I see in this technique are : 1- All maildirs should be on same device to be able to use hardlinks. This is the case with me , but to make it general we can create a shared spool for each partition and modify the algorithm to copy the message when we deliver to a maildir that exists on a different device.

2- What about if user modified the message ?! .. A problem .. we can solve this by making the message read only for the user.

What do you think ? Let me know your comments as I am willing to start hacking maildrop source to make it work like that..

Best regards

============================================ Ramy M. Hassan AAST , College of Engineering and Technology. Teaching Assistant ============================================

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