Christofer C. Bell wrote:
On 12/13/05, Manish Kathuria <manish@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there any limit on the size of the mail spool files in the spool
directory /var/spool/mail ? I have a user whose mail file is above 2 GB
and procmail cant write any further mails there ? AFAIK, the file size
limits are pretty high and in TB now.
2GB is the maximum filesize and it's due to limitations in the
operating system's filesystem driver, not any kind of quota. There
may be other filesystem options for Linux or options you can feed
mke3fs that will allow larger files (like enabling "largefiles" on
vxfs) but I'm not sure what they are. Anyway, as for your user's
email, there is nothing that can be done other than deleting some of
the mail there to make room for more.
If you want, you can backup the partition that the data is on, create
a filesystem there that's capable of supporting files larger than 2GB,
and then restoring the data. Keep in mind that filesystems that
support larger files generally have less space available due to the
filesytem accounting information necessary to support the larger files
(which is handled much like segment + offset memory in the old DOS PC
days).
Best of luck!
--
Chris
"I trust the Democrats to take away my money, which I can afford. I
trust the Republicans to take away my freedom, which I cannot."
I'm assuming you're using the mbox format if you have a 2GB mail file.
With that, I'd suggest thinking of moving to a maildir format. This
would get around the filesize limit because all of the emails would be
split into multiple files. There are scripts you can find to read all
the entries in your spool file and split them into their own files.
Another advantage would be, if you are using IMAP, this allows you to
create folders to split up your mail. You'll need to research how the
maildir format works with POP3 ('cause I've never done it), but I'd
guess it would work. You may also need to worry about whether there will
be enough inodes on the drive to accomidate all those files. I don't
know if that'll be a problem (I don't know much about inodes and all
that stuff), but I've heard of other people running out of them with too
many files, so I'm just making you aware of it.
Hopefully that makes sense {^_^},
Justin Willmert
