microsoft mail problem

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, May 07, 2008, Jeroen Elias wrote:
>To all Outlook Express users:

>If you are using Outlook Express, I can tell you there is another "danger"
>when using OE.  Microsoft is not very clear about this, but recently I
>heard about a 2GB file size limit to any of the OE folders.  I use Outlook
>Express for managing my private e-mails, and so does my wife, using her own
>profile.  One time her mailbox got too large, being almost 2GB in size. I
>didn't know about this limit back then.  OE started to behave very wierd.
>New e-mails got into her Inbox, but OE was unable to finish off and
>removing the e-mails from the POP box.  Exiting OE and restarting it
>resulted into a "no items to show" in the Inbox :-((( The file exceeded the
>2GB limit! There is no way you can get OE to open this folder again, except
>using some other "recovery" utility somewhere from the internet.

This is true to one degree or another in any mail store that puts all
messages in a single file or database.  This is why we use Maildir stores
on *nix systems which store each message in its own file.

This eliminates file locking issues allowing shared access on multiple
servers simple.  Deletes and adds only affect a single file thus are
essentially instantaneous (time deleting the first message in a large
single-file mail store).  Backups are also much simpler as only new files
need to be backed up and deleted ones removed.

We have been using Maildir storage with courier-imap for almost ten years
now at a variety of sites including regional ISPs with tens of thousands of
e-mail accounts.  We have had to replace failing mail servers with no loss
of data by simply building a new server, creating the accounts, changing
DNS to point to the new server, then using rsync to copy over the user's
old mail from the old server to the live new server.  There's a short
period of time during which a user's old mail will not be on the new
server.  It took the better part of an hour to rsync all user mail on a
system with about 10,000 e-mail accounts.

Finally we strongly recommend using IMAP, leaving all messages on a server
instead of transferring them to a desktop machine.  This makes your mail
accessible from any IMAP client or webmail, and eliminates the problems
converting between different mail clients or desktop machines.

To bring this a bit on-topic, I'm shipping out one of our new Atramax
servers, http://www.atramax.com,  to a FilePro client tomorrow where it
will replace a 3-year old system of ours that is experiencing mysterious
lockups.

Bill
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