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