[ale] IMAP slowness

[Christopher Fowler]

Our IMAP server is running slow.  I/m getting complaints that Outlook
takes forever to load inboxes. 

One users mail is totalling 380M for just the sub folders

[root at moses INBOX]# ls -l
total 388948
-rw-------    1 perry    perry    54952675 Jan 24 12:56 2003
-rw-------    1 perry    perry    151311973 Apr 21 12:18 2004
-rw-------    1 perry    perry         507 Mar 13  2003 CCC-32
-rw-------    1 perry    perry    49931884 Apr 22 08:48 Chris
-rw-------    1 perry    perry    141657343 Apr 22 08:35 George
[root at moses INBOX]# du -h
380M    .

His inbox is 88M
[root at moses INBOX]# du -h /var/spool/mail/perry 
88M     /var/spool/mail/perry


I use the fetchmail -> procmail system here and we use IMAP to view the
inboxes

[root at moses INBOX]# rpm -qa | grep imap-2
imap-2001a-1.72.0
[root at moses INBOX]# uname -a
Linux moses.outpostsentinel.com 2.4.9-34 #1 Sat Jun 1 06:10:23 EDT 2002
i686 unknown


When we access the IMAP server I see the hdd light on solid for a few
minutes.  They keep saying that the problem is that IMAP can't handle it
and that Exchange will.  With 500M of data in your mailbox I doubt
Exchange can handle it any better than Linux running IMAP.  

I get in arguments with this guy all the time about mailbox size and
that at a real company he would be given a quota.  Using fetchmail to
retrieve mail from a pop3 server and then procmail to place them in
boxes is there a way I could impose a quota?  Maybe add a filter to
procmailrc that will count the bytes in an email and redirect to
/dev/null if it is greater than 5M.  That could limit the amount of
damage done by quotas.