2

I'm not running into a problem or anything, I was just curious about this when I saw I have 2 folders with around 20,000 items in each. Everything works fine (using Thunderbird), but I couldn't find anything with Google about this. Anyone ever heard of a limit on this with Courier IMAP?

Paul Kroon
  • 2,250
  • 1
  • 16
  • 20

3 Answers3

1

It depends on the file system:

  • FAT16: 512 per folder
  • FAT32: 65534 per folder
  • NTFS: 4,294,967,295

In Linux, the limits are based on the number of inodes and the size of the drive. Note that ext2/ext3 and others that use the standard inode directory layout have a limit of ~32,000 sub directories in a directory.

For 20,000 files, use a file system that stores files in a tree structure, rather than the list structure as used by ext2/ext3, UFS, FAT16/FAT32. You might also want to increase the size of the directory cache.

Walter
  • 1,057
  • 7
  • 14
  • 1
    The dir_index feature makes ext2/ext3/ext4 use hashed b-trees to speed up lookups in large directories. Can be set with tune2fs(8) in the unlikely case it isn't already (probably a really old fs). – Ángel Jan 08 '15 at 22:43
0

AFAIK there's no limit of mails per IMAP folder in Courier IMAP or the IMAP4rev1 specification.

But the underlying file system on which the Maildir files are hosted could have a hard limit for the number of files per directory or at least may suffer performance degradation if a certain number of files in a single directory is exceeded.

20,000 mails/files should not be a problem, though.

joschi
  • 21,387
  • 3
  • 47
  • 50
0

Just for other people's information here. I run an e-mail host and I've seen inboxes and mail folders with over a million messages in them. Granted, they are really slow and it causes other issues at that point with just loading the folder, but it will work eventually. I usually call people out after their inbox grows past 40,000 messages or so.

deltaray
  • 1,535
  • 10
  • 14