[Dovecot] Limiting the size of index files

[Mike Brudenell]

Greetings -

On 15 Nov 2007, at 07:36, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> That was the plan, Maildir keywords are the only exception. I was  
> also thinking about changing that some day so that it's not possible  
> to set more than 26 keywords with maildir. I think this is currently  
> pretty much a nonissue because keyword support is pretty bad with  
> most IMAP clients and no-one has more than maybe 10 different  
> keywords.
>
> Anyway, by "just delete them" I meant dovecot.index.cache files, not  
> the others. :)

Eeep!  Can I just check that I'm not doing something silly? ...

Our mail layout is as follows (using user "abc1" as an example):

   /mailstore/messages/a/abc1       ... Mail files in Maildir format
   /mailstore/control/a/abc1        ... Control files
   /mailstore/index/a/abc1          ... Index cache files

The first two are NFS-mounted; the last is on local disk.

Our load balancers direct people to their "preferred" host, failing  
over to another server if need be.  This means that when someone's  
preferred server is down for maintenance they can still access their  
mail, but end up getting index/cache files created on a "non- 
preferred" server.

Obviously these need cleaning up from time to time...

So we are currently using a housekeeping job (tmpreaper) to delete  
anything in or below a user's index directory that hasn't been  
accessed for 90 days.

I had thought I had read this was safe to do: that the index and  
caches files would be (re)built from the Maildir files if need be.   
But from what I read above, is it actually only safe to delete the  
dovecot.index.cache files?  That the index.cache files have to be left  
in place to avoid data loss?

Or am I worrying unnecessarily: that it would only affect people using  
more than 26 keywords?  (Rare)

Cheers,
Mike B-)

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