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Good POP3 Server for Huge Mailboxes?

Posted by Cliff on from the preventing-postmaster-hernias dept.

brainchill asks: "I've got about 10,000 users split between a couple of quad 550 xeon machines. The machines have 2GB of ram. The problem is that the UW POP3 server takes a huge hit in both cpu and memory utilization when a 40+MB mail spool is requested via POP3. Sometimes it's bad enough to drag the monster boxes to their knees. What other POP3 daemons do you guys have experience with and how do they perform with large mailboxes"

6 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. A left-field solution by grossdog · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you want your users to love you, check out Dartmouth's
    Anyone who has ever been to Dartmouth or any other school using a BlitzMail installation will vouch for the strength, ease of use, and plain usefullness of the system.

  2. DBMail by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.dbmail.org/ I was looking thru their site, havent actually used it but it sounds like it might reduce the load on you're servers massively. tho i'd want to use postgres and not mysql for the back end.

  3. Your problem is caused partly by hardware? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Could your problem be caused partly by hardware? Hevanet.com, the best ISP in Portland, Oregon, USA, uses a special SCSI system run with a special version of NetBSD supplied by a company in Arizona.

    Retrieval of mail stresses the filesystem; Hevanet's system is a combination of OS and hardware meant to take the load.

  4. Re:Stop using mbox and switch to Maildir by Matty_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've used the Postfix + Courier-IMAP combination with Maildir on a production mail server and it worked very well.

    Every now and then I would have a customer call who was having problems getting their mail due to a corrupt bad message in their mailbox. Getting rid of the offending e-mail was a simple 'rm' command in the shell.

  5. Re:Mailbox format by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Because I don't know the answer, please at least briefly explain why XFS is bad with maildir and reiser is better. Thanks.

  6. Re:Spoken like a true user by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If a mail server is "trashed" or "crashes" (I've also seen complained about) simply because it was sent a large email, then the server is, frankly, buggy. Instead of trying to run with a flaky server and put policy requirements on users to work around the problems in the server, use a non-broken server.

    --
    May we never see th