On 29/05/2012 15:18, Alan Brown wrote:

This is something Timo hacked up for me a few years ago and I realised should be on the list in case anyone else wants them.

The following patches will limit maildir folders to 4000 messages on Dovecot 2.0.* and 2.1.*

The Specfile patch is against the Cityfan Redhat EL5 SRPM but is likely to work on most build platforms

Changing the message limit requires a recompile. It's brutal and ugly but it prevents users overloading FSes that can't cope with huge numbers of files (EG: GFS2)

Hi, sorry for the dumb question, but isn't there already in Dovecot a way to limit the number of messages?

Something like:

quota_rule = *:messages=4000

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Quota/Configuration

Or it's something different?

On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 14:18 +0100, Alan Brown wrote:

This is something Timo hacked up for me a few years ago and I realised should be on the list in case anyone else wants them.

The following patches will limit maildir folders to 4000 messages on Dovecot 2.0.* and 2.1.*

The Specfile patch is against the Cityfan Redhat EL5 SRPM but is likely to work on most build platforms

Changing the message limit requires a recompile. It's brutal and ugly but it prevents users overloading FSes that can't cope with huge numbers of files (EG: GFS2)

Perhaps you should try mdbox some day?

Another related thing someone asked about was about making kind of an "alt storage" to Maildir by keeping new mails in new/ and older mails in cur/. So that if the Maildir has like 1M messages Dovecot would only very rarely need to scan/modify cur/ because most of the changes would happen in new/.