On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Arunas Norvaisa wrote:
> I (or, to be more exact, my hosting providers - 3 of them) have following
> problem with Exim 4.24:
>
> - my mailbox generates ~500mb/day incoming (NOT outgoing - I'm not a
> spammer, you know..) mail transfer;
>
> - while I'm downloading it (sometimes it's taking quite long time, as you
> can imagine), inbox file becomes locked (quite logical thing) and no
> new mail is delivered;
>
> - after download I experience what I really don't want to: those messages
> which were received by the server, but not delivered aren't delivered for
> a few hours, days, or even lost forever. The 'record' time between 'recei-
> ved' and 'delivery-date' headers was somewhat around 50 hours;
I suspect you would have the same problem with any MTA, not only Exim,
that uses a single file for your mailbox. Heck! 500MB. That's
*enormous*. What on earth are you doing getting that much data as email?
If people are sending you videos or other large data files, why not
consider other ways of accomplishing this? Get them to put them on a web
site or an ftp site or whatever. Email is not designed as a bulk data
mover.
> Hosting companies are trying to help, but don't know how.
If they really want to help, and you really have to continue doing this,
they'll have to change the way your mailbox is stored. As another poster
said, using maildir format helps, because each message is then in a
separate file, so (a) more than one can be delivered at once and (b)
reading delivered messages does not hold up the delivery of new ones.
But if the number of messages is very large, you then run into problems
with having lots and lots of files one one directory.
I hope this gives you some pointers.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
