Tony Nelson wrote:
At 7:52 AM +0100 7/27/05, Robin Bowes wrote:
...
I'm now using /home for other things, e.g. /home/apache has all my
websites, /home/vpopmail has all my mail, and I've used up all my inodes.
It seems to me that there are also a lot of files in your home directory;
might they also be email?
No - all my email is in /home/vpopmail/domains/robinbowes.com/robin/Maildir
It is true however, that I can potentially clear out a lot of chaff from
my home directory to save a few inodes and I will indeed do that.
I think what you need is an email program that uses mbox format to store
the messages. Each mbox file can contain thousands of messages (or more).
Mbox is just all the messages concatenated in one file, with a blank line
between, and a standard first line to each message. For efficiency, it
needs a second index file. Many bogus complaints about it exist, but you
are finding out now why putting each email in a separate file is not a good
idea (just good for demoware). There are other proprietary formats to keep
multiple messages in single file, but its often easier to import into them
than get the messages back out when you want to switch to another email
program.
I am aware of the mbox mail format but, being a hardened qmail user, I
was brought up on maildir and am quite happy using it.
The problem is that I manually adjusted the inode allocation when I
first created the file system as I believed that I would only be storing
relatively few large flac files on there.
All: Robin seems to be using Thunderbird, which I google as using mbox
format, so why is he having inode troubles? Uhh, I'm new to all this, so I
don't quite get where vpopmail comes in. Would he have 2 copies of each
email, one in Tbird and another in the vpopmail directory?
I use Thunderbird on my clients to read mail/news, but all my mail is
stored on my server and accessed over imap using bincimap.
All: Would a loop device volume (man losetup) to store his email be the
simplest way out of this mess?
Erm, no.
Thanks for the suggestions.
R.
