We have a similiar setup as you. About 1500 users, but only 500 or so actively using our email service.
We modified the UW IMAP before production so all email is delivered to a ~user/.inbox file instead of /var/spool/mail. Procmail was also modified to deliver email properly. All new users are created with a ~user/INBOX file so that when they check email the first time, it will move it over to the mbx format mailbox (I think I had to modify sourcecode to do that too). The changes were only 1 or 2 lines of code.
But uring the last few years, the number of users with 1GB or more mailboxes have jumped. And since all mailboxes other than inbox don't have mbx format, performance is starting to be an issue. I'm now looking at the mix format or switching to Cyrus. Is the mix format stable enough now to put in production? If email is corrupted for any reason, is it recoverable?
thanks nancy > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: [Imap-uw] performance recommendations? From: Brian Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:27:35 -0500 To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: list Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed MIME-Version: 1.0 Message: 4 All, we have a mail system with approximately 400 users and it has worked fine for many years utilizing sendmail, mail.local, UW pop3/imap, and standard unix mailbox format. Over the past few years we seem to have aquired a few users who are determined to store a huge amount of email in their INBOXs (read 1GB+). It's mostly due to large attachments, not the number of emails. Once it gets to 2gb, we have to move their mailbox out of the way (move it from /var/mail/username to ~/mail/inbox.something) in order for their email to function properly again. It then becomes another folder that they can look back on and they're okay with that. Personally I find that once the mailbox size reaches 300MB+, my imap client software becomes intollerably slow. So likewise I do the above inbox shift to speed things up every so often. I know the real solution is to train the users to keep their inboxes relatively clean either by deleting old email or moving the email to an alternate folder, but that's more of a training issue than a technical fix. On the technical side, I'm wondering if changing the mailbox format to something other than a flat file (mx, mh, maildir?) would give a performance boost for those users? From an administration standpoint I like the standard unix mailbox format because it's very simple to deal with and matches what the Thunderbird pop3 users have on their local hard disks (easy to switch between imap and pop3 by FTPing the spools). But for these 20 or so users who are determined to grow their inboxes to huge sizes, I'm wondering if shifting them over to a different format makes more sense. Thanks for any suggestions. -Brian
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