At 11:24 AM -0800 3/18/00, David E. Weekly wrote:
>Uwe,
>
>Okay. Fair enough. So I have a very, very trivial question for the list.
>(BTW, ext2fs gave me a kernel Oops this morning: something I haven't seen
>for 4.5 years!) I think that it is an appropriate one.
>
>I have a Linux server with a good amount of storage, a decent amount of
>RAM, a fast processor, and a blazing fast network connection.
>
>I want to use it as my mail server (for JUST ME!) and be able to check my
>email efficiently from multiple locations. I happen to have a lot of mail
>(>5000 messages, ~200/day), so I'd also like to be able to filter my
>messages.
>
>The answer so far has been to use qmail w/IMAP patched for Maildir. But now
>that it seems that my underlying filesystem is unhappy enough about this
>idea to crash my kernel, it's not seeming like such a hot notion.
>Previously, I had used qmail with an mbox file. This worked until my mbox
>grew to about 50Mb, at which point my system choked, since every five
>minutes when my client would duck in to see if it had any mail, the entire
>mbox file would be loaded in from disk, parsed, and stored in memory,
>causing my disk to thrash not only due to constantly reading in such big
>files, but also from the paging generated from having a 50Mb process in
>memory.
>
>I have not found a trivial way to use filtering with the two above
>scenarios. (A pointer to a FAQ and/or an answer would be great: I'm more
>than happy to RTFM when I know where the FM is.)
>
>So right now, as a single user on a powerful system, I have no good way to
>handle email. This seems pretty pathetic. Anyone care to lend (well, okay,
>give) a few words of advice?
Sounds to me like you need two things, a better IMAP server and a
better mail client. You don't say which client you're using, but I'd
suggest giving mutt a try. mutt can handle both maildirs and
mailboxes natively, and also do IMAP. You should also give Sam's
courier-imap a try, which is written for Maildirs and is also likely
to be far more efficient than imapd. (I go only by the reputation of
imapd, since I've never used it (and, with its CERT record, never
would). courier-imap I do use, and it works well.) Sam's maildrop
does filtering, and also understands Maildir, and there are procmail
patches for Maildir if you want to use procmail for filtering.
I get around 200 messages a day myself, but very little of that gets
saved. I find filtering with maildrop, using courier-imap and Eudora
or mutt as clients to be a good solution for that kind of volume.
Sounds to me like you're saving a lot, and you might want to look
into saving into a database for long term storage.
>
> -david
>
--
--
Paul J. Schinder
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 693
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
