Mailing List Archive

You could setup cyrus imap/pop. (No idea what you're using now.)

http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/

From the cyrus readme:
The server makes an attempt to do single instance store where possible
when an email message is addressed to multiple recipients.

changes:
* Implemented single-instance store: deliver, when using LMTP, will
only store one copy of a message per partition, and hard link it
among multiple users. Sites with a large number of partitions could
see a performance decrease.

So, in a best case scenerio, that message may only take up 1MB on the disk. Something to consider.

Bryce



On Wed, 5 Jun 2002 13:07:27 -0400
"Joseph Kezar" <jkezar@doc.state.vt.us> wrote:

> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated,
> Joe Kezar
> Linux Systems Administrator
> Vermont Department of Corrections
> (802)241-2314
>
>
>
> --
>
> ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##
>


--
bryce@uniserve.com

[. On Wednesday, June 5, 2002 at 13:07:27 (-0400), Joseph Kezar wrote: ]
> Subject: [Exim] Scalability
>
> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?

You might consider blocking all messages of more than about 150KB or so
and tell your users they _MUST_ use a proper file transfer protocol.... :-)

What's your POP/IMAP server?

Perhaps you also need something like Cyrus IMAP, with which you can
easily implement mailbox quotas.

--
Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098; <gwoods@acm.org>; <g.a.woods@ieee.org>; <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 01:07:27PM -0400, Joseph Kezar wrote:
> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?

Use a mailing list management system which can do per list message size
restrictions among other things

Mailman is quite popular and is very compatible with exim:

> ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##

We have 576 lists with mailman and a 30,000 user userbase so it scales
quite well :-) Biggest list to date is 10K users.

You can use mailman, or exim filters, to filter out attachments. You can
use SpamAssassin to limit spam to lists and Exiscan to remove viruses which
are another common cause of high mail volumes and filling mailboxes.

Mike

--
-----Plain text only please - attachments stripped on arrival.------
Copyright 2002 Mike Richardson, Room G98, Manchester Computing
University of Manchester, M13 9PL doctor@mcc.ac.uk Int: 56009
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First door on left. URL http://kira.mcc.ac.uk/ Ext: 0161 275 6009
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"If I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you!" - Chuck Norris
"If anything happens to my daughter I have a 45 and shovel" Clueless

Greg A. Woods wrote:

>[. On Wednesday, June 5, 2002 at 13:07:27 (-0400), Joseph Kezar wrote: ]
>
>>Subject: [Exim] Scalability
>>
>>We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
>>ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
>>is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
>>picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
>>is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
>>because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
>>around this nightmere?
>>
>
>You might consider blocking all messages of more than about 150KB or so
>and tell your users they _MUST_ use a proper file transfer protocol.... :-)
>
You might also like to try message_size_limit_count_recipients

This takes the message limit and multiplies it by the number of
recipients therefore you could have a 20Mb
limit on your message size which should not affect anyone (okay many
people ;-) but it means that they will
not be able to mail more that twenty people a 1Mb video or whatever it
may be.

Kind regards
Xander

On 5 Jun 2002, at 21:09, Xander D Harkness wrote:
> You might also like to try message_size_limit_count_recipients
> This takes the message limit and multiplies it by the number of
> recipients therefore you could have a 20Mb
> limit on your message size which should not affect anyone (okay many
> people ;-) but it means that they will
> not be able to mail more that twenty people a 1Mb video or whatever it
> may be.

This would avoid me many massages. unfortunately i have another
problem:
some of these huge messages come from officil sources and must
not be blocked, neither bounced.
I should have this option:
if (the message is sent to more than 4 people) _and_ (the product
addresses*size is greater than 20 MB ) _and_ (the message is
greater than 100 kB) then
the message is sent to a specified address modifying the reply-to
header so it points to all original addressees
(I have a special address that get the message, optionally decode
it and put all the parts on a web page, then sent to reply-to the url
of the page )
is there a way ?
(the oversized messages are not bounced, just forwarded to a
different address )

Leonardo Boselli
nucleo informatico e telematico
Dipartimento Ingegneria Civile
Universita` di Firenze
V. S. Marta 3 - I-50139 Firenze
tel +39()0554796431
cel +39 3488605348
fax +39()055495333
http://www.dicea.unifi.it/~leo

> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?

I can't think of anything that would not annoy people, so why
not increasing disk space? IDE drives are very cheap and the 3ware
controllers perform excellent at a very reasonable price. 7 drives (3
pairs plus one hot spare) with 40 GB each gives you 120 GB netto capacity.
Using software RAID, which works well on Linux, you could also use 8
drives on the controller as JBOD plus a hotspare on the regular IDE
controller, getting 160 GB netto capacity.

Michael

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Joseph Kezar wrote:

> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?

Educate your users on appropraite uses for such a large mailing list.

--
Piglet gave Pooh a stiffening sort of nudge, and Pooh,
who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got
up slowly and began to look for himself.

Use Cyrus as your local message store. With "single store" turned on,
it would have only stored a single copy (perhaps a few more, depending on
how many recipients it send it per message).

Tom


On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Joseph Kezar wrote:

> We have 1400 users happily using exim. We've implemented it about 8 months
> ago. Currently we are having issues with our email servers capacity. There
> is 30+GB of mail stored there. Here is a scenerio: One user has a humerous
> picture and decides to email it to all-staff@doc.state.vt.us. The picture
> is 1MB in size. The disk usage has just increased on our mailserver 1.4GB
> because of that one picture (1MB x 1400 users = 1.4GB). Is there anyway
> around this nightmere?
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated,
> Joe Kezar
> Linux Systems Administrator
> Vermont Department of Corrections
> (802)241-2314
>
>
>
> --
>
> ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##
>
>
>