Hi,

We have problems with some of our pop3d users spiking the load on our mail server. A couple of users set their mail client to not delete messages from the server, and their inboxes grow around 100 megs.

Thus, when they check their inbox, courier's pop3d has to scan 100+ megs worth of messages, which requires a lot of i/o and processing.

Does anybody have a clue on how to solve this issue? I have found this thread:
http://pop3dproblem.notlong.com/

Thanks fot your help,

Marco

You can either use a POP3 daemon with less functionality, such as qpopper which is careful not to have to reread and rewrite everything constantly, or go to a different mail storage format such as Maildir.

Or put in an administrative and policy limit on the allowable size of mailboxes.

Kevin

Kevin, thanks for your answe.. I have not said in my post that we use Plesk and I would like to keep courier as much as possible.

About the maildir.. am I wrong if I say that courier supports only mbox? So it will mean have another software...

:(

Marco

We are building a new server with Plesk 7, any suggestion on a substitute for courier that would fit in Plesk configuration?

I'm not a Plesk person, sorry, but I'm quite certain Courier can be configured to use maildir. The issue is whether all of your other software can be so configured, and then you have to convert existing mailboxes, as well.

Thanks,
Kevin

Courier supports the maildir and mbox formats. I use maildir with courier IMAP and courier POP3, no problems at all.

IMAP is quite a bit faster and more efficient for keeping mail on the server (which is what I use) -- it's blazingly fast at opening a mailbox with 2000 messages and serve the subjects for new messages. However, accessing the same mailbox with POP3 takes about 3-4 seconds, on every mail check :(.

Sorry.. I made a mistake.. we already use the maildir format...

Any other suggestion?

Thanks,

Marco