Jim wrote:
On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 12:25 (-0500), Wietse Venema wrote:
Finally, if you want to keep lots of mail around, don't keep
everything in one huge mailbox file.
I actually have a bunch of huge mailbox files ;-)
(Yeah, way too much email.)
Instead, use Maildir format with one message per file,
I thought about that once, but I decided I have too many e-mail
messages for that. (I don't want to run out of inodes, nor do I want to
make file accesses too slow because of the number of files in the
directory.)
I converted "local"[*] storage from mbox to maildir a number of years
ago - IIRC I was starting to see performance issues with mbox in part
due to the way I manage my mail and in part simply due to the number of
messages I keep around.
This account has ~13G of mail on my PC, with over 100K messages each in
two folders, several in the tens of thousands, and most dedicated
mailing list folders holding somewhere between about 5K and 8K messages
each.
The only performance issues I have are:
a) something sucks in the the IMAP protocol such that my mail client
keeps having to create a new connection and reauthenticate - it's not
strictly a timeout, because it's not on anything remotely resembling a
predictable timing
b) Seamonkey has a subtle polling issue probably at least partly related
to a) that (eventually) causes it to such up gobs of RAM, get slow, and
crash on a certain action. This usually takes a couple of weeks.
Local storage is ext4 on a SATA SSD, although I wouldn't expect a
noticeable performance difference if it were on a conventional hard drive.
-kgd
[*] Due to some legacy mail flow that would be painful to convert, I
pull mail with fetchmail, deliver locally with procmail (sorry), then
expose it to my mail client with a local Dovecot instance.
