Re: [Evolution] POP3 mbox performance and auto-expunging?

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 19:20 -0400, Internaut at Large wrote:
> If you create a mbox file, in excess of 2 gig on a linux box (at least
> under Fedora, and SUSE, I've not tested it under Ubuntu) and try to
> use
> it as a mail file, you get a very interesting error message, much
> along
> the lines of "the file system cannot deal with that large of a file of
> that file type" but you can still do things like "cat" to it.  Hence
> the
> suggestion of formail and procmail connected to move it into a maildir
> format.

I just tried this to see what would happen. I created a large mbox by
concatenating multiple copies of an existing folder:

% ls -lh M
-rw-rw-r-- 1 poc poc 2.7G 2008-08-21 22:04 M
%

I then imported the file into Evo. It took 3 or 4 minutes and gave no
error messages. The mailbox appears to be all there.

This is Fedora F9 64-bit on an ext3 filesystem, Evo 2.22.3.

A 32-bit system might give a different result but I don't have one to
test. In any case, if there is a difference I would assume it to be
caused by an address-space limitation (or lack of available swap) rather
than a problem with the filesystem. AFAIK ext3 on 32 and 64-bit versions
of Linux is the same. Note that procmail and formail process their input
sequentially, so would not be subject to this kind of problem.

To emphasize the point: any difference between mail files and other
kinds of data is due to the way they are being processed, not to
anything in the filesystem. The filesystem knows nothing about mail
files as such.

poc