[Dovecot] IMAP quotas - Reasonable size?

[Johannes Berg]

> I'm setting up dovecot (IMAP only) at an ad-agency (Lots of big files attached to mails). I'm 
> wondering... What would you consider to be reasonable mail quota? My concern is, that some 
> client-software will have problems with huge mailboxes. I was going to give everyone 2GB, but some 
> users demand 15GB+. Does dovecot "prefer" mailboxes within a certain size?

I tend to think that it highly depends on the filesystem/IO scheduler
etc, at least with maildir.

I'm using maildir on ext3 (with dirhashing) on a Xen instance (so I/O is
terribly slow) and the limit up to which I can tolerate the wait seems
to be at about 30-40k mails in a single folder irregardless of mail
size. You can probably improve on that with XFS (directory listings are
cached in memory rather than re-read every time) and by having a
dedicated server, which I assume you do.

So if you have 30k 10MB emails you're already at almost 300 GiB :)

FWIW, my Inbox currently has about 16k mails with 276MiB size, but I'm
fairly sure you can fare just as well with larger mails.

johannes
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