Re: mbox file size limitations?

GLEN HERRMANNSFELDT wrote on 17. 7. 2018 3:35:
> Many C implementations using 32 bit int have a 2G
> file size limit.  This happens even if there are
> no fseek() calls.

Moreover, even on those systems having larger int, there's an issue 
somewhere in the common part of code. Sometime, about 128 bytes of 
mailbox starting at offset 0 gets overwritten by random bytes, so 
mailbox become corrupted for subsequent operations.

The issue seems not to be related to particular mailbox format driver as 
I observed the issue for both UNIX and MBX mailboxes, but it seems to be 
related to concurrent access to particular mailbox (e.g. issue related 
to locking or so).

Also, performance penalty for so large files shall be noted. Exim uses 
either traditional UNIX format of mailbox or MBX. At least in the first 
case it take a lot of time to re-read the mailbox content and some 
clients are known not to be patient enough.

As a result, I'm recommending to keep all mailboxes bellow 2GB of size.

Dan

>> On a Debian system I support, exim4 delivers mail to /var/mail/<username>
>> mbox files.  Is there a known limitation to the size of those files that
>> uw-imap imapd and pop3d can support?
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