[Dovecot] Expected size of index-files?

[Cor Bosman]

> "For webmail type setups indexes help a lot. For Outlook/Thunderbird
> they help a lot less." 
> 
> Very interesting!
> 
> I'm scared to use (index) files that go sort of unnoticed (it's not
> calculated in the maildirsize file) and can potentially grow with no
> limit. 

Diskspace is a lot cheaper than memory. I would not worry about
index disk size. In pre 1.0 era we used to use memory indexes because of
regular corruption in the indexes, but im very glad we now can use permanent
indexes. We bind customers to a specific imap server, and on each server
(out of 20) I see about 10GB in indexes. 

Surely not all of your customers use imap. And if you really want to, you
could opt to delete old files. Dovecot should be able to handle that gracefully.

Cor