dovecot - Sep 2011 - Can't got mail by OUTLOOK for a half million mails account

Hi,

I used postfix always_bcc to backup mail. And  up to now the backup account
has half million mails in cur/, when I first time tried to receive the mail
by outlook, it failed , no responds.

Does any one has some good idea to deal with this problem?


Thanks

On Fri, 2 Sep 2011 10:34:29 +0800
Dong Ding articulated:
> Hi,
> 
> I used postfix always_bcc to backup mail. And  up to now the backup
> account has half million mails in cur/, when I first time tried to
> receive the mail by outlook, it failed , no responds.
> 
> Does any one has some good idea to deal with this problem?
You have got to supply some info. The output of "dovecot -n",
"postfix
-n" and any log files created would be a good start. In addition, the
output from "Outlook" would be invaluable. Specifying the versions of
all the applications involved would be a plus also. No one here has a
crystal ball, or at least I don't.

-- 
Jerry ?
Dovecot.user at seibercom.net

Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or get ignored.
Please do not ignore the Reply-To header.
__________________________________________________________________
According to all the latest reports,
there was no truth in any of the earlier reports.

Depending on Outlook pst format, I know the old (outlook 2000) format
can't have more than 16383 or 32767 (can't remember which) messages in a
single folder. Ran into this problem at our office once. Best solution
was to use sieve to split the mail archive into folders by year and by
month. This makes it easier to copy the archive offline as well.

-Greg


On 2011-09-01 7:34 PM, Dong Ding wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I used postfix always_bcc to backup mail. And  up to now the backup account
> has half million mails in cur/, when I first time tried to receive the mail
> by outlook, it failed , no responds.
>
> Does any one has some good idea to deal with this problem?
>
>
> Thanks
>
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On 9/1/2011 10:34 PM, Dong Ding wrote:
>
> I used postfix always_bcc to backup mail. And  up to now the backup account
> has half million mails in cur/, when I first time tried to receive the mail
> by outlook, it failed , no responds.
>
> Does any one has some good idea to deal with this problem?
>
If it's IMAP, you may have to try Thunderbird or some other IMAP client. 
  But most are going to horribly die past 100k messages in a single 
folder (and some will die much sooner).

There's also the brute force method of moving 90% of the messages to 
some other temporary folder on the file system, grabbing the 50k that 
are left.  Then moving messages back into the new/ folder in batches of 
50k or so.

I'll echo Gregory's comment that you really need to setup some sort of 
Sieve rules to split out messages to sub-folders on-the-fly going forward.