On Tuesday, 04.11.2003 at 10:05 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Tuesday 04 November 2003 09:57, Toomas Aas wrote:
> >> You have over 5 gigabytes of mail? I find that hard to believe,
> >> not even a major spammer would have that much.
> >
> >Alas. These days, when just about everybody sends mail in HTML
> > format, it is customary to send HUGE .doc files back and forth and
> > nobody ever deletes any old mail, it is not that uncommon.
> >
> >Just an example from our mail server (ca 300 users):
> >
> >root@data2:/data# du -h --max-depth=1 | grep MAIL
> >21G     ./MAIL
> 
> Good grief Toomas!  Can you not institute a mail box size limit, about 
> 10 megs maybe?

Depends on the context, of course.

An IMAP server where all mail is stored on the server (including
sub-folders, possibly going back many years etc.) you could justifiably
need a few hundred megs for each user, perhaps more.

Toomas's 21GB for 300 users equates to about 70MB per user, which
doesn't sound too silly.  If this is just the mail *spool*, however
(it's not totally clear from the example), I would have thought that it
would affect performance (especially to remote users accessing their
spools) to have spool files of that size.

Dave.
-- 
Dave Ewart
Dave.Ewart AT cancer.org DOT uk
Computing Manager, Epidemiology Unit, Oxford
Cancer Research UK
PGP: CC70 1883 BD92 E665 B840 118B 6E94 2CFD 694D E370