[SATLUG] Large Mailbox threshold

[Brad Knowles]

Leif Johnson wrote:

> Can someone tell me if it really matters how much email my boss 
> accumulates and refuses to pop down to her workstation? Logwatch has 
> been warning me, but the boss likes to pop and save a copy on the server 
> to imap from home. I guess my question is: WHAT IF THE THRESHOLD IS 
> EXCEEDED? Will her mailbox freeze up at some point. How do I avoid the 
> wrath that would ensure once the superintendent's mail box freezes even 
> after repeated suggestions to empty it?

There are plenty of POP and IMAP servers as well as clients that will barf 
if the mailbox gets too large.

In those cases, you are lucky if the worst thing that happens is that access 
to the mailbox is temporarily lost until such time as the mailbox is reduced 
in size.  In many cases, the mailbox will get corrupted, quite possibly 
beyond any ability to recover, thus forcing a restore from backup.

If your boss wants to be able to access the same data from home and work, 
the solution is to use IMAP in both locations, and then periodically copy or 
archive the messages from the server to the local disk.  I do this every 
month, and we have mailbox limits of 100MB.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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