Any potential gotchas using Maildir with MailScanner?

[Mike McMullen]

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Silva" <ssilva at SGVWATER.COM>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 8:52 AM
Subject: Re: Any potential gotchas using Maildir with MailScanner?


> Kai Schaetzl spake the following on 12/28/2005 8:41 AM:
>> Jeff A. Earickson wrote on         Tue, 27 Dec 2005 20:46:08 -0500:
>> 
>> 
>>>This isn't a MailScanner issue, but you are probably aware that 
>>>maildir gobbles up zillions of inodes on your mailbox filesystem, 
>>>and you need to plan for this...
>> 
>> 
>> And how? Smaller block-size on separate partition for the mail 
>> spool/storage? Do I need one inode per message?
>> 
>> Kai
>> 
> A simple solution would be to use ReiserFS on that partition, as it
> stores its metadata in a b-tree index, and doesn't suffer with the inode
> limit problem. It is supposed to be much faster with the smaller file
> sizes also.
> 

Thank you to everyone who responded. After reading feedback from the
list and my testing on a dev box, I converted my mail folders to Maildir
format last night on the production system as a "pilot". 

I converted roughly 100,000 emails of my biz and personal stuff from mbox
to maildir (roughly 60 folders) using mb2md-3.20.pl. It worked like a champ
with the exception of  ~20 emails ending up with dates of 1969.

I had to do some minor mods to my procmailrc file and recipes so 
that procmail knew to use maildir format and where the folders were 
but it went very smooth. My list mail is getting sorted in the right folders
and dovecot found everything without me having to do anything. 

Regarding inodes, according to "inndf -i" I have just under 50 million inodes
free so I think I am fine. There are only 10 of us on the server. 

I use s/w raid 1 (mirroring). Can you use reiserfs with a software raid device?

I use rsync for offsite mirroring as a backup strategy. After the initial rsync to
get all the new folders/files etc to the offsite system, I found backup times
greatly improved over using mbox. My guess is no huge compressed diffs
for big mboxes that only had one or two emails added to them.

There were no MailScanner/SA/Sendmail issues at aside from slightly changing
my bayes training script.

So all in all a big success so far. Now I can convert everyone else over
the weekend.

Again thanks to everyone who responded!

Mike
 

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