journaling fs and large mailbox format

[Stanislav Sedov]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 04:11:29AM +0300, Alin-Adrian Anton wrote:
> Dear Hackers,
> 
> 	First of all thank you for your time and attention.
> 
> 	I am in the position to implement a large-scale mail server and I 
> 	will never go for anything else but FreeBSD (fixation?).
> 
> 	It should be able to handle graceously 4000 e-mail accounts where a 
> minimum of 50 Mb/mailbox would be a requirement. In the begining, it is 
> desirable that users could use as much free space as available, so this 
> implies some gigabytes/mailbox.
> 
> 	I don't know if the mbox format can handle this, and I know Maildir 
> cannot handle this on UFS2 standard install, no matter of soft-updates. 
> (because it exhaustes the free nodes) So I currently have no solution 
> for this stuff.
> 
> 	I was wondering what is the status of Journaling File Systems on
> FreeBSD? Any which is usable and mature, with write access? XFS would 
> fit amazingly well with Maildir, but.. I doubt it's anything else but 
> readonly.
> 
> 	So any suggestion would really help a lot. Thank's in advance.
> 
> 	
> Yours Sincerely,
> -- 
> Alin-Adrian Anton
> GPG keyID 0x183087BA (B129 E8F4 7B34 15A9 0785  2F7C 5823 ABA0 1830 87BA)
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0x183087BA
> 
> "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." - Voltaire
> 

Consider to use DBMS storage as alternative. IMHO, this is more flexible
solution, especially if you have a lot of disk space. Also you will be
able to buil a mail cluster to scale your solution.