[wplug] telnet for email

[John]

Hmm,

If you check the pop and pull the messages down once a day like I do, that's
not a big deal..  What's worse than anything is watching a user get a whole
cd set about 1.8 gig of 2 meg rar files.

>
>As a sysadmin who has to deal with users who do this, I have to say how
annoying this is.  Using pop3 as if it were IMAP is not what the 
>designers of pop3 had in mind.  
>

This sounds like a piss poor implementation, not a user problem.  Why would
you want to do this and take the huge IO penalty of copying a file in place
then opening to the pop daemon?  It's not like servers are not IO limited
enough as it is.  Are you trying to be redundant and watch what the files
are doing?

Last I looked pop3 daemons don't do that, and here's a trace:

stat64("/var/spool/mail/jstrange", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0660, st_size=0, ...}) =
0
stat64("/var/spool/mail/jstrange", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0660, st_size=0, ...}) =
0
alarm(0)                                = 0
alarm(0)                                = 0
alarm(0)                                = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1055896718
open("/var/spool/mail/jstrange", O_RDONLY) = 2
fstat64(2, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0660, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
close(2)                                = 0
alarm(0)                                = 0
alarm(0)                                = 0
write(1, "+OK Mailbox open, 0 messages\r\n", 30+OK Mailbox open, 0 messages

>
>On our pop servers, every time you open a pop connection it copies the
spool file to a temporary file, and then opens that file for the pop 
>session.  
>

Read above, then see this:

ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/cucipop/

>
>Now imagine people with hundred-megabyte spoolfiles on a maildrop system
with hundreds of users.  Every time it starts a new session (some
> people schedule this for every minute) it has to copy this file and parse
through it.  Lots of IO, disk space and headaches.
>

If you wouldn't copy your temporary spool files to a temporary location and
then try to open the spool file then you wouldn't have a performance issue.

>
>If you want to leave your mail on the server, use IMAP.
>

-- 
Jonathan S Billings <billings at negate.org>
TSFNKP
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