IMP also has an option to preview messages. It reads the entire
contents of the messages (should only be 20 or so for the 'current'
INBOX window), and will display the first 200 characters or so of the
email. Is it possible the numbers you're seeing reflect the total
size of his most current 20 emails?
I am fairly confident that IMP is reading the entire mailbox. The burst of traffic caused by this user's imap process was about 500MB in size (as reported by iptraf), same as the size of the user's mailbox, same as the "bytes out" reported by Dovecot. The user has close to 4000 messages in his mailbox. I just verified that the maximum messages per page that can be set is 999.
Thanks.
-- Chris O'Regan chris@encs.concordia.ca Senior Unix Systems Administrator, Academic IT Services Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Concordia University, Montreal, Canada