On Monday, June 25 at 10:10 AM, quoth Scott Zahn:

Currently where I work we use qmail. Every time a message is delivered, qmail seems to walk through the user's entire maildir in order to calculate quota usage.

Qmail doesn't support quota calculations. The quota calculation you describe must be being performed by some add-on to qmail (such as vpopmail's vdelivermail. If it's not doing a good job, you may want to look into using a different add-on.

~Kyle

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. -- Oscar Wilde

Hello,

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:10:00 -0400 (EDT) "Scott Zahn" scott@zahna.com wrote:

 Currently where I work we use qmail.  

My condolences. The worlds most patched PoS (software, really, I mean software) by the biggest ego in the business.

Every time a message is delivered, qmail seems to walk through the user's entire maildir in order to calculate quota usage.

That doesn't seem right, not if it is using maildirsize maildir++ quotas, see: http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/README.maildirquota.html

The worst case scenario would be a full mailbox, which would trigger a full recalculation every 15 minutes (Exim does it every 20 minutes). This recalculation is part of the specification, of course a smartly designed mail system will (with a few scripts and a database of sorts) prevent delivery attempts (and thus recalcs) to full mailboxes.

So the first thing to check is if these mailboxes are perma-full or if they get so much activity that the maildirsize quickly grows to the 5k size that triggers a recalculation. If neither is the case, then yes, qmail is your enemy (surprise, surprise). Or if you are delivering with something else, that is the culprit then.

Delivering messages simultaneously to just a few users who are allowed large maildirs (1-2GB) will bring our servers to their knees. Which brings me to dovecot. I use dovecot whereever I can, but haven't yet needed to set up quotas. I would like to migrate my servers at work to use dovecot, but have a few questions regarding quotas. Could someone explain how dovecot calculates quota usage on mail delivery? Also, is there anyone here on the list that uses quoatas on large maildirs (>=2GB)? How well has it worked for you?

Again, having to recalculate the quota eventually is part of the specification. If your hardware (I/O) can stand the infrequent recalculations working maildir++ quota requires you are gold.

Regards,

Christian

Christian Balzer Network/Systems Engineer NOC chibi@gol.com Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services http://www.gol.com/