On 1/4/2011 9:38 AM, Jeff wrote:
>
>> Here are our relevant specs.
>>
>> sendmail-8.12.11-4.RHEL3.6 (we may not be able to upgrade this due to too many
>> modifications)
>> imap-2002d-14
>> procmail-3.22-10.el3.centos.0
>>
> Regardless of the maildir vs mbox argument, I would be seriously
> examining why you have painted yourself into a corner with your
> customized sendmail. Eventually, you will have to move on.
Errr, why??? Sendmail has nothing to do with local deliveries.
> What are
> the motivations for the customizations? Do newer or alternate MTAs
> have added features that can replace those customizations? Postfix can
> be highly customized through configuration and is not that difficult
> to learn.
Why change the part that isn't broken.
> As a migration path, I would separate the MTA (sendmail) and the imap
> server. Go with cyrus or dovecot on a new machine (virtual?) and use
> imapsync to move messages to the new box during a maintenance window.
> As stated in other responses, cyrus has it's own mail storage format
> with individual files for each message and dovecot supports several
> formats including maildir. It should not be difficult to have your
> existing sendmail deliver messages to the new imap store either
> directly or with a very simple postfix MTA on the imap box. Once mail
> storage is fixed, you can start working on de-customizing your MTA.
Sendmail will let cyrus or procmail or another local delivery agent
handle the file format details - and probably already does.
> And with regard to backup space, it might be time to suck it up and
> tell your users that you need to implement mail quotas. How much are
> you backing up from "Sent" and "Trash" because nobody maintains their
> mail folders? A quota can be a great tool for teaching basic mail
> folder housekeeping.
Anything that does sensible incrementals will use much less space with
'file-per-message' formats instead of mbox because the bulk of the
messages won't change between runs. But maybe another solution would
be to put the backups on a block de-duplicating filesystem like zfs.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com