-----Original Message----- From: Paul Heinlein Sent: Friday, June 13, 2014 12:32
On Fri, 13 Jun 2014, Chuck Campbell wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 09:14:06AM -0400, Jason Pyeron wrote:
Does anyone know how to get procmail and dovecot to play happily together with mboxes? I'm on Centos 6.5, fully patched.
I'm getting tons of lock timeouts which is killing performance.
That is 1 of 2 reasons why we switched to Maildir.
What was the second reason? Always looking for
justification to take
up the line with my recommendations...
I can't speak for Jason, but here are some of our reasons for switching to Maildir (which works well with procmail):
- Incremental backups are much smaller
- Large mailboxes aren't a bottle neck
That's it. 15 users, with 20 2GB+ mbox files with a daily change of a 100k+ was killing our backup effort by having to backup .6TB every day.
And the load on the imap server was through the roof, now it averages a 0.01
Bruce Schneier recently quipped that sometime around 2006 he stopped filing messages into named folders because e-mail searches became faster than manually sort. Many folks now use e-mail clients with pretty fast search features, so using mailboxes as a sort of filesystem became inefficient -- so mailboxes (particularly the main inbox) get large. Maildir is so much faster in that sort of environment.
(I'm a dinosaur, still using a CLI mail client, so I still prefer folder-based organization -- but I recognize I'm part of a small and shrinking minority.)
Are there any tools to convert procmailrc files to maildir compatible recipes?
Changing destination names, and adding closing '/' characters is really all that's needed. E.g.,
:0
- ^List-Id:.*<centos.centos.org>
mailinglists/centos
becomes
:0
- ^List-Id:.*<centos.centos.org>
.mailinglists.centos/
The closing '/' tells procmail to use Maildir.
And we did this in the global procmailrc file:
root@mail ~ # cat /etc/procmailrc DEFAULT="$HOME/Maildir/" MAILDIR="$HOME/Maildir/"
User .procmailrc can (but shouldn't) still put in mbox, but the inbox was the first to go to Maildir.
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