Hi,
I'm very new to administering mail, and this is surely a newbie question. I have my own IMAP mail server because I use my email as a way of filing important things, and I subscribe to a number of lists that I like to archive. I have about 40 mailboxes with up to 80,000 messages in some, and one with 40,000 messages is almost a Gigabyte in size. The total size is around 4 Gigabytes. Things were working quite well until I upgraded to OS X 10.4 and its new Mail.app mail client and then everything was too slow. I was using the UW IMAP server (2002d if I recall right) and Mail.app 1.3.9. I tried upgrading the server to the latest, but it didn't improve things noticeably. I swapped to dovecot 1.0alpha1, and used the mbox format, but that wasn't any better. I read that Maildir format was better, so I converted my mail to that format and tried that. It didn't seem much better. I tried to compile Cyrus on OS X and ran into all kinds of difficulty. I finally tried Cyrus on a Linux box, and turned off all my rules that move messages around. In comparing this to dovecot on my OS X box, Cyrus loads the messages significantly faster. I think there are some problems with my dovecot setup though. My mail.log is filled with this type of thing.
Sep 15 16:43:51 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<frohro>, method=PLAIN, rip=172.17.128.191, lip=10.7.3.11 Sep 15 16:44:43 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap(frohro): Timeout while waiting for lock for transaction log file /Users/frohro/Maildir/dovecot.index.log Sep 15 16:44:57 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=<frohro>, method=PLAIN, rip=172.17.128.191, lip=10.7.3.11 Sep 15 16:45:51 cubex-wwc-edu dovecot: imap(frohro): Timeout while waiting for lock for transaction log file /Users/frohro/Maildir/dovecot.index.log
I've tried mutt, evolution, kmail, and am now using Thunderbird, and am working on getting Mail.app to import an archive of my 4 Gigs of mail, thinking if nothing else works, I can have a copy of that on the clients I use, though I like having it on the server better.
Can anyone suggest something to fix my problems, besides deleting all my email?
Thanks,
Rob