On Sat, 2012-06-23 at 07:04 +0200, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote: > Hello > > I am having a hard time with users using POP while leaving mailboxes > of several gigabyte cumulated. This causes a lot of disk I/O and kills > performancs for everyone. I try to encourage people migrating to > IMAP, but that migration will take some time, and therefore I am looking > for alterantive ways to workaround the problem.
What mailbox format do you use? This shouldn't be a problem with for example mdbox, probably not with sdbox either and with mbox/maildir there are settings that can improve this. Or are you not talking about opening the mailbox, but about clients redownloading all the mails all the time? > I found pop3-throttle-plugin.c, which seems a smart way to solve the > problem, unfortunately it comes with no documentation. I was able to > build it and load it, bu itsays nothing in the logs. Is there any > doc somewhere? Any advices on how to set it up? It's about allowing clients to see only X new mails per Y time. But I don't see how that would help with your problem if that's related to old mails. Anyway, quick docs: "touch /etc/dovecot/pop3-throttle-enabled" to enable the throttling plugin { pop3_throttle_max_msgs = 10 pop3_throttle_max_kbytes = 1024 } Which allows a single user to see max 10 new messages or max 1 MB of new messages per 15 minutes, whichever limit comes first. After 15 minutes more messages become visible again to reach the limit. The 15 minute limit is configurable by recompiling: #define POP3_THROTTLE_STATE_RESET_SECS (60*15)