What's a Reasonable Inbox Size?

Sami Ketola
2020-05-07T17:46:33Z

> On 7. May 2020, at 18.39, Asai <asai at globalchangemusic.org> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I have several users who have inboxes that are over 20 GB.
>
> Lately I have noticed Dovecot logs say it's taking over 30 seconds to
sync their mailboxes.
>
> As email admins,  how do you handle inboxes that are so large? Do you use
mailbox types that have better performance like dbox? We're using maildir.
>
> What's a reasonable inbox size?  Is 20+ GB reasonable and nothing to
worry about?
>
> Thanks for any insight here.


It's more like huge number of files in single folder than the pure size of
the mails combined. For filesystem based storage formats number of files is
always a challenge.
In your case mdbox probably would work better as it stores multiple mails in
single file. The only downside is that it requires periodic purge operations to
remove deleted mails from middle of the mail bundles.

Sami