[Dovecot] Users with large (4GB) inboxes crippling dovecot

[Frank Elsner]

On Thu, 28 May 2009 02:07:01 -0700 (PDT) robforrest wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new here and would very much appreciate any help you can give me.
> 
> We are running a rather outdated mail server that until recently has been
> running beautifully.  Under the pretense of "it is ain't broke, don't fix
> it" it hasn't been updated so is running Fedora Core 4 and dovecot v0.99.14.
> 
> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they are shown
> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and access a given
> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10 minutes.  I
> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes, several users
> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
> 
> Do any of you know how I could split these large mbox files down in to
> manageable chunks of 1GB?

I don't know. I know that maildir is far better for this situation.
You should 
            - Upgrade dovecot
            - Convert to maildir format

For the conversion to maildir refer to the discussion on this list.


--Frank Elsner