dovecot - May 2009 - Users with large (4GB) inboxes crippling dovecot

Hi all,

I'm new here and would very much appreciate any help you can give me.

We are running a rather outdated mail server that until recently has been
running beautifully.  Under the pretense of "it is ain't broke,
don't fix
it" it hasn't been updated so is running Fedora Core 4 and dovecot
v0.99.14.

What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
have inboxes in excess of 4GB.

Do any of you know how I could split these large mbox files down in to
manageable chunks of 1GB?

Please be aware that I only have remote access to the server over a modest
internet connection.

Thanks again for any suggestions.

Rob
-- 
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On Thu, 28 May 2009 02:07:01 -0700 (PDT) robforrest
wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new here and would very much appreciate any help you can give me.
> 
> We are running a rather outdated mail server that until recently has been
> running beautifully.  Under the pretense of "it is ain't broke,
don't fix
> it" it hasn't been updated so is running Fedora Core 4 and dovecot
v0.99.14.
> 
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
> 
> Do any of you know how I could split these large mbox files down in to
> manageable chunks of 1GB?
I don't know. I know that maildir is far better for this situation.
You should 
            - Upgrade dovecot
            - Convert to maildir format

For the conversion to maildir refer to the discussion on this list.


--Frank Elsner

on 5-28-2009 2:07 AM robforrest spake the following:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new here and would very much appreciate any help you can give me.
> 
> We are running a rather outdated mail server that until recently has been
> running beautifully.  Under the pretense of "it is ain't broke,
don't fix
> it" it hasn't been updated so is running Fedora Core 4 and dovecot
v0.99.14.
> 
It's broke, you need to fix it. This system is an accident waiting to happen
(or a bot waiting to be owned).
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
> 
> Do any of you know how I could split these large mbox files down in to
> manageable chunks of 1GB?
> 
> Please be aware that I only have remote access to the server over a modest
> internet connection.
> 
> Thanks again for any suggestions.
> 
> Rob
Why not try a current version of dovecot. 1.0 would help a lot, and 1.1 would
be even better. 0.99.14 has been improved so much, you are just not going to
fix it easily.

You can get more current rpms of dovecot from atrpms.net, but you might have
to either try a RHEL4 version (loosely based on Core 3) or rebuild a src rpm
on a core 4 machine. That is one of the problems with running core on a
server. If you let it get too far out of service, you have more trouble
updating it.


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On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 02:07 -0700, robforrest wrote:
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
mbox_very_dirty_syncs = yes would probably make these mailboxes usable
without having to split anything or convert to Maildir. That requires
Dovecot v1.0+ of course.

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robforrest schrieb:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new here and would very much appreciate any help you can give me.
> 
> We are running a rather outdated mail server that until recently has been
> running beautifully.  Under the pretense of "it is ain't broke,
don't fix
> it" it hasn't been updated so is running Fedora Core 4 and dovecot
v0.99.14.
> 
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
> 
> Do any of you know how I could split these large mbox files down in to
> manageable chunks of 1GB?
> 
> Please be aware that I only have remote access to the server over a modest
> internet connection.
> 
> Thanks again for any suggestions.
> 
> Rob
Hi Rob, cant say something
about 4 G Mailboxes TB and dovecot,
but i can see that TB gets into troubles
with courier maildir when going over 0,5 GB Mark and thousends of emails
typical
with mail lists
so i speculate the problem goes more to TB then to dovecot
Regards

robforrest wrote:
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
FC4 is quite old... can the kernel and filesystem you're using properly 
handle files over 4GB?

This is certainly one advantage dbox and maildir have -- not being limited 
to the FS file size limit per folder.

But what sort of user puts 4GB of mail into a _single_ folder??

-- 
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net

On Qui, 28 Mai 2009, Curtis Maloney wrote:
> But what sort of user puts 4GB of mail into a _single_ folder??
Those that never delete the emails nor move them into folders.  
Everything they ever received is in the INBOX.

And yes, this happens a lot.


-- 
Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo at kalinowski.com.br