[ale] IMAP slowness

[Christopher Fowler]

procmail is responsible for putting all email mesasges into one file


Here is a rule:

:0
* ^From.*gwelborn at opsup.com
George

This rule places all email from George into a file called George.  Its
these files that grow to huge sizes


On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 09:53, Jason Fritcher wrote:
> 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