Score:1

How best to deal with large dovecot inboxes?

ir flag

I have a small number of mail users (abut 100) and some have comparatively large (10Gb+) mail boxes. I'm running Ubuntu using postfix and dovecot Maildir format.

I could just keep adding storage, but perhaps a cheaper way is to extract attachments older and larger than a threshold, and put these in a place for user download (eg S3) before auto deletion? Not sure how to do that exactly though.

What do others do?

I also thought of compressing mail over a certain age, but I'm not sure if that would free up much space.

diya avatar
la flag
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/zlib_plugin/
Score:0
la flag

Unlimited mailbox sizes require an unlimited budget

Since hardly anybody gets that, even the free e-mail providers that gave unlimited storage stopped doing that AFAIK, you need set set some (more or less hidden) limits.

The traditional solution: mailbox quota.

That caps the amount of storage your mail users can consume and puts a cap on your costs.

That effectively makes the mailbox owner responsible for cleaning up their own mailbox and staying below their assigned quota or they won't receive e-mail anymore. That solves your technical problem.

If and when there is a a business need to extend the quota, then the business should understand that extending storage comes with a price-tag.

Setting a low limit on allowed attachment sizes reduces the growth rate of mailbox sizes. That does require a suitable collaboration alternative and a change in the methods people collaborate, but your mail server won't overflow with the 22 revisions of the power point presentation your colleagues sent back and forth.


I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.