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Date:      Tue, 27 Oct 1998 16:22:48 +1100 (EST)
From:      Rowan Crowe <rowan@sensation.net.au>
To:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Expiring old mail?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.01.9810271609110.15586-100000@velvet.sensation.net.au>
In-Reply-To: <v03102813b25ace8e9928@[209.3.110.25]>

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On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Kitt Diebold wrote:

> I just installed cucipop as my POP3 server. It has two BIG advantages to me:
> 
> 1. Doesn't make a copy of the users mail file, so I can use quotas without
> a problem
> 
> 2. Allows you to set an expire on the mail. I have it set up to annoy
> customers by forcing them to download undeleted mail on the server that is
> over 4 weeks old. That was they can get it and delete it themselves (and
> figure out that they shouldn't check that damn button in Netscape....).
> Take a look at the man pages. You can also set it up to autodelete the mail.

I also recently changed to cucipop, there's a BIG difference in
performance between that and what I was running previously (the POP3
server that is bundled with the University of Washington IMAP server).

The uw-pop3 server severely loads the machine when someone has a large
spool file. Two very undesirable things happen:

a) Swap used goes up by as much as 100Mb per 20-30Mb of spool indexed -
occasionally it runs out totally and the pop3 process (and sometimes
others) are killed off. To be repeated again in 30 sec when the user tries
again...and again...and again...

b) The machine almost totally 'freezes' for the duration of the initial
index after USER/PASS. This can be a couple of minutes at a time. Packets
are passed (presumably they're done in real time as an interrupt), but
everything else slows to a tenth of a snail's pace. Lines ring out, a few
keypresses of an established inbound telnet may take 20-30 seconds to
show, inbound TCP connections take half a minute to happen, etc.

I have *never* seen any other application impose such a resource load on
my servers. (main mail server is a little underpowered, P90 w/ 24Mb RAM,
but it's still not exactly a weak machine)

After changing to cucipop I am wondering why I didn't do it a lot sooner.
:) As a test I emailed myself a couple of 5Mb attaches and the memory
usage reported by 'top' didn't even rise past 1Mb. From memory it sat rock
solid on something like 480k, only the usage of that process rose.

I'm running it in daemon mode, rather than through identd as uw-pop3 was
(another advantage).

The only thing I've found wrong with cucipop so far is that it doesn't
support the LAST command, which appears to be actually part of the POP3
spec. This is a bit of a surprise, since the rest of the man page mentions
that certain commands will "break the spec" and tends to sound very
careful about that kind of thing. Anyone know why LAST isn't implemented?

Other than that, cucipop comes highly recommended.

Cheers.


--
Rowan Crowe                     Sensation Internet Services, Melbourne Aust
fidonet: 3:635/728                                          +61-3-9388-9260
http://www.rowan.sensation.net.au/             http://www.sensation.net.au/


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