[Alpine-info] Local folders

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Mike Miller wrote:


> On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Aidan Wilson wrote:

>

>> My institution only allows 100MB of inbox storage on the server, and only 

>> 2MB (!) of storage in all other folders put together.

>

> Off Topic .... But --

>

> What the heck is the problem with some of these universities?  A 1 TB drive 

> costs less than $100 now, so a GB costs a dime.  Use RAID1 and you're up to 

> twenty cents per GB.  So why can't they give out a little more space to their 

> people?  Email is so mission critical, so central to academic work these 

> days, they should be going all-out to make it very easy on all faculty, staff 

> and students.

>

> I use gmail and fetchmail.  I won't use a university account because I never 

> know what they'll do next.


Of course it isn't as simple as just buying a 1TB SATA drive.  :)

Let's say you provide a 1GB mail quota for each person.  Most folks won't 
use that much space (fortunately), so you can probably get about 5,000 
accounts in 1TB of space (over-subscribing).  However, if you try to have 
even a small percentage of 5,000 people access their email at the same 
time, that cheap 1TB SATA drive won't be able to handle the load.

So depending on your mail server software, the number of disks you buy 
will be governed by how many I/O's per second you need.  If you have nice 
software (Cyrus!) or a smart disk array (Sun Unified Storage?), you can 
get away with a lot fewer disks than you might otherwise need.

Anyways, I don't want to go overboard with the technical stuff.  There are 
a lot of details that go into building an email system and providing 
quality email services.  A 100MB email quota is getting small these days. 
We provide 200MB here, although we are nearing the end of our 5 year 
upgrade/replacement cycle.

 	Andy