[Gllug] Large mail files was -> RedHat

[Mike Brodbelt]

Steve Nicholson wrote:
> 
> So what's the best way to go about having large amounts of mail stored?

Probably to use an IMAP mailstore with a sensible implementation of the
backend message storage. I'm not aware of any mail client that uses an
internal mail format that scales properly - they're all bad at larger
sizes. Good old mbox gets rather slow... The outlook PST file
implementation just dies above a certain size, IMO. When I use to use
Outlook at work, more than 50-70 megs of mail would corrupt it.

> I basically keep everything as it is very useful to refer back to what a
> customer asked me 12 months ago and what I replied.  Ok so I'm using
> outlook now, archiving regularly and opening the relevant archive when
> required (I also have them burnt to CD).  I hope to have time in
> December to complete my move to full time use of Linux and aiming to use
> "mutt" as my mail client (I like everything I have read about it so far
> and will be nice an fast on P133 laptop I will have rather than a full
> GUI).

I have all my mail on a Cyrus IMAP server. Here, I have a GLLUG folder
with over 16000
messages in it, that loads in less than 2 seconds in Netscape. Netscape
caches the headers, so it takes longer if I go to a new machine and read
all 16000 headers, but I do that rarely, and it's still not too slow.

Cyrus stores each message as a separate file - that being the case, a
Reiserfs partition is a good idea for your /var/spool/imap directory, as
it's overwhelmingly small files. Mutt reads it fine, though Mutt
annoyingly does not cache IMAP headers, which slows it on large folders.

Other IMAP implementations use other backends, and suffer from them. UW
IMAP is great for compatibility with an existing mbox setup, but the
backend is held back by mbox limitations.

Mike.

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