Re: Qpopper continually fails to POP mail from large mbox

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Gerard wrote:

> For what its worth, I just had a mbox size of 12M on one account. Not
> extremely large by any standards. Using 'qpopper' the download failed as
> it usually does with a large mbox size near or over 10M. I immediately
> changed to 'popa3d' in the inetd.conf file and restarted it. Now, when I
> attempted to download the email messages it proceeded without incident.

I have had clients with mailboxes more than 5 times this size working
sucessfully with qpopper. It's a matter of tuning the timeouts at BOTH
client and server ends.

A lot of the failures are caused by long startup delays on qpopper on
large mbox files. This is caused by the need to index the mailbox.

> In any case, my system is now working. I will shortly be changing over
> to a postfix/courier-imap system so these sort of problems will never
> happen again anyway.

That is my recommended path these days.

QPopper doesn't play well with Imap servers and is best used in small
sites with well-maintained users.

AB