Re: [Imap-uw] Took the plunge to MIX

[Bob Atkins]

Title: Untitled Document

Jeroen, I'm sorry - user education about email box size. That simply isn't going to happen and the sooner eberyone realizes this the sooner we will have better client software that will allow and/or keep a user aware of the storage resources that they are using. Today, not only are users completely clueless as to how much space is being used when then send and receive large attachments - they don't care. From their perspective storage is an unlimited resource. I have to deal with entire companies on this issue and I have just given up. I send them a bill every month for excess storage charges and they pay it. My job is to make sure that they can get to their email no matter how big their inbox and sent folders get. One major deficiency in the entire imap based email system is the complete lack of user visibility as to how much total space they are using in their inbox and other folders. Many clients will show individual message size and none of them add it all up or show it on the folder pane. This further reinforces the user's ignorance - they just don't realize how much space they are using. As a service provider we have no real, meaningful way to let users or their administrator know how much space they are using without requiring them to us a separate web portal for their mail - something nobody wants to do. Lastly - most users regularly read and hear about disk drive capacities in the 300G-1TB range today so to expect them to care about a 10GB inbox is just asking too much. They think that they have a 300GB drive - they don't realize that their email is being stored somewhere else and that there are still limits to how big individual files can be. Jeroen van Aart wrote: James H. McCullars wrote: Haven't heard a peep today.  One of my co-workers says that before today it would take his webmail application three or four minutes to display his inbox (if it displayed it at all) and now it takes about 10 seconds. Maybe some user education is in place? No one should need such a huge INBOX. It's easy enough to create folders for different purposes and move  emails there, if not just delete old stuff you never really check anymore. I also saw you have people with mailboxes larger than 1 GB, due to large attachments. You maybe would want to limit attachments to about 50 mb. If anyone has a pressing need to abuse email to send more, give them an (s)ftp account. Also, in case you use a php based webmail setup, such as squirrelmail, you may like to set this in the appropriate php.ini file such as /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini memory_limit = 64M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB) If left at the default mailboxes larger than about 500 MB may just timeout, as your co-worker experienced. >    The next thing I need to do is convert users' folders to MIX.  But > this has gotten us over the hump.  Thanks to all who replied both on- > and off-list. I converted people's INBOX files and certain standard files (Sent etc.) to mbx format. But I didn't touch any other mailbox files they may have created. It'd be kinda hard to keep up and those normally are in less need to be converted. It seems clients, thunderbird at least, create mailboxes in unix format. Best regards, Jeroen _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list Imap-uw@u.washington.edu http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw -- Bob Atkins   President/CEO Business Inter-net-working The Cure for the Common ISP! Phone: (310) 577-9450 Fax: (310) 577-3360 eMail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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