What's a Reasonable Inbox Size?

[Joseph Tam]

On Fri, 8 May 2020, asai at globalchangemusic.org wrote:

>
>> It depends on what you consider reasonable.
>> 
>> The processing time of file operation that iterates through a mailbox
>> will generally go up proportinately with size.  If you do a text search
>> without some indexing system like Solr, it will take a very long time.
>> 
>> If the mailbox is just some archive that you pile up and forget about it
>> except for once in a blue moon retrieval, then it might be reasonable.
>> 
>> If it's an active mailbox, it will be a pain to navigate, in the same
>> way a single folder with 100K files or a file cabinet with huge stacks
>> of envelopes.
>> 
>> I would guess some partioning of the large mailboxes into smaller
>> mailboxes would help with active mailboxes.  Most people spend most of
>> their time on new/recent messages, so making time or size or subject
>> based volmes wouldn't be a bad idea.
>> 
>> If the bulk of the size are redundant copies of attachments, then Dovecot's
>> *dbox support de-duping which would aso help.
>> 
>
> So, generally speaking, you don't want to have inboxes that just sync all day 
> long, due to massive amounts of small files in the inbox.  This may be OK in 
> the case of a rarely accessed archive folder, but not good for regularly 
> accessed inboxes, etc.?
>
>
>
>

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>