[Dovecot] Help! OT: Blackberry IMAP client suggestions/experience needed

Benjamin R. Haskell dovecot at benizi.com
Thu Mar 13 19:47:52 EET 2008


On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, Stewart Dean wrote:

> Plus I have to wonder what the realities of moving from 1) mbox with one 
> monster file to 2) maildir with inodes beyond measure and its effect on 
> backup.

With reasonable average email usage patterns (averaging >=4K/message -- 
not hard to do with the occasional 5-10MB message), you'll run out of disk 
space long before running out of inodes on any reasonable filesystem. And, 
I'd think many tiny files would scale better for backup software. 
(Depending on how 'dumb' the software doing it is, I'd think "minor change 
to one huge file" would be less-efficiently stored than "new tiny file" or 
"deleted tiny file".)


> [...]
> Remember: when you (the sysadmin) do things really, really right, nobody 
> knows you've done anything.  Sounds like a 0 to negative sum game......

Amen to that. Especially when it comes to something like email, where even 
the slightest interruption is intolerable.

But, by the same token, it sounds like your experience with BB+mbox is 
already moving you toward the negative (secretaries already noticed 
something wrong). Might be worth the effort to try it out with the BB 
users.

Best,
Ben


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