In traditional Linux email server, mbox-format files are used for each user mailboxes, which all incoming emails (eg. in inbox) are stored in 1 files. It is not efficiency to seek for one requested email in a huge mailbox file with many emails, and default size limitation (4GB by default, but it can be changed) of a single file on Linux system.
Starting from 2002, we uses Maildir-format files for email mailboxes on our and our client's Linux email systems. Maildir-format is a file folder/directory for each email mailbox folders (eg. inbox), and each emails are stored in individual files in the same file directory.
Maildir-format is efficiency to seek for one requested email (which just get the requested file and send to the client program) and also IMAP operation (moving emails between mailbox/folders is just moving physical files on physical file system).
We did some system migration from mbox to Maildir in these years. A tool named mb2md is easily to do the mailbox conversion. It can be installed easily on Debian systems with the following apt-get installation command.
$ apt-get install mb2md
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