[ale] IMAP slowness

[Jason Fritcher]

Christopher Fowler wrote:
> 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.

The problem is UW-IMAP and the mbox format. When mailboxes get that big, they
can take a long time to parse fully. I used to run that awhile ago, but switched
over to using Courier-IMAP because it uses Maildir format where each message is
its own file. Its much quicker for the imap daemon to scan just the headers of a
few thousand files than have to parse the headers and bodies of the same
messages all stacked up in one file.

> 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.

The quick and dirty solution would be an account level quota using the quota
system. But, that might be alot courser than you'd like. :)

--
Jason Fritcher
jkf at wolfnet.org
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