[ This belongs in comp.mail.misc. ]
> 2. The more mailboxes you have, the slower the entire
> popping process will be. The reason is very simple,
> each pop process will spawn and read your mailbox
> directory.
You have a highly deficient pop server implementation. The fork-on-connect
model is dead. A well written threaded server can handle tens of thousands
of concurrent connections.
> /export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox
That just moves the problem around. Traversing those intermediate
directories isn't exactly a light-weight set of operations.
> Although this example is not good in the case where you
> accept usernames with 3 or less characters.
A proper hashing algorithm would solve that.
--lyndon