[Dovecot] IMAP quotas - Reasonable size?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:01 +0100, Tobias Balle-Petersen wrote:
> 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?

As Johannes said, the mailbox size doesn't really matter to Dovecot,
only the number of messages (except for operations such as server-side
search). It's also possible to specify a message number quota, but since
users can have multiple mailboxes it's less of a problem if users have
ten 10k message mailboxes than one 100k message mailbox.

Anyway, Dovecot should be able to handle tens of thousands of messages
in a single mailbox easily. I've been testing it with a 350k message
mailbox once in a while. With ext3 it takes maybe 20 seconds to
initially read the directory into cache, and after that for each sync
(new message, flag change, expunge, etc) it takes about 2 seconds to
sync. v1.1's dbox format doesn't need this syncing and all operations
are pretty much instant.

I don't know about clients though.

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