Re: limiting mailbox size

>
> > Why do we need this? Well, when a user's mailbox gets to 7M or
> > so, POP3 clients start timing out and we start getting support
> > calls. :-) The idea is leave the messages in the mail queue until
> > the user collects his GIFs or whatever and then deliver new mail.
> > (Yeah, to make this work, individual mail messages must be
> > smaller than the limit....I was thinking 3M mail messages and 5M
> > mailbox size.)
> >
> > Any easy way to do this, or does it require programming?
> >
> >
>
> Use Cyrus instead. Cyrus pre-indexes the mailbox. Almost no difference
> in speed between opening a 2 MB as opposed to a 20MB mailbox (tested on a
> slow Sparc IPC). On a resonable system, Cyrus should be able to handle
> 100MB mailboxes with out a problem.
>
> Cyrus can also give you mailbox size limits as well.

While I heartily recommend Cyrus (always wanted to "heartily recommend"
something) I'm not sure that is a solution to your problem. I'm really
beginning to think this is a problem that has to be solved on the
client end. I'm using Cyrus and have users using Eudora Pro. If the
mail message is more than about 3MB they time out. If they mail message
has more than about 100 people in the To: line Eudora crashes, in both
cases the mail message is left on the server, not removed. This means
I soon have a user calling and complaining. I'm currently trying to figure
out if Cyrus sets the seen flag for the user when he starts downloading.
If it does I can set up to delete all seen messages at 0-dark-early. This
is contrary to what IMAP is all about, which is really what Cyrus is for,
but keeping my phone from ringing (meaning no complaints) is what being
a sysadmin is all about.

(Oh, I have a solution to the 100 To: line thing, Exim filters are wonderful.
I just have to convince myself that throwing away headers is acceptable.)

Roger