[cobalt-users] deb beeg maleboxes ul kill ya

[jale@xxxxxxxxxx]

WOW - I got on a bunch of users about having WAY to much mail left on the 
server, files from 2meg up to about 63meg. Watching TOP it was just crazy 
how much CPU time was going to this. One user checking his 29meg file took 
17seconds of CPU and often had as much as 35% utilization. Our CPU usage in 
the active monitor was showing WAY high, like 5.5-6.5 was not abnormal.

It is now running about 3.2, and everything is screaming now, what a 
performance improvement.

Here is a great trick to clean up others email, if they want to complain 
about confidentiality tell them no problem, that you now charge for email 
by the byte/day. And you see from/subject, no details unless you really 
wanted to (real exciting, reading others email, there was this one girl,,, 
ah, sorry :)

The simple/quick method - tell everyone that no mail is allowed to be left 
on server, give them a few days to comply. Then watch TOP, as soon as you 
see them check their mail, delete their mail file. Problem solved.

The more fancier way (time consuming, but I had a customer pay me to do 
this on all 125 users in his domain): Set yourself up a dummy openwebmail 
account. Copy the user's email file your dummy account, ie: 
/home/spool/mail/usermail to /home/spool/mail/dummymail

Tell openmail to POP3 - check your mail. If all the mail is read, click one 
button to check-all, move to -- DELETED -- . When finished, copy 
/home/spool/mail/dummymail to /home/spool/mail/usermail
They now have a clean file. If it's all old mail, unread, trash it. If they 
have mostly spam, check-all then uncheck the ones (by subject/sender) that 
appear to be maybe real mail, and not too old. Trash the rest. The do the 
copy back. The only thing to be aware of is if the usermail file got bigger 
while you were doing this, then if you copy it back they will have lost 
that most current mail that just came in. Probably SPAM anyway.

One time the copy changed the permissions on my dummymail to root so I got 
webmail errors, but after I had similar with a 10061 error last week, it 
was about the 1st thing I looked for.

The openwebmail is slow, but for this purpose it worked great. And the MIS 
manager at this company didn't even think this was a harsh solution, he 
just said GO FOR IT.

We found one user sent a 7.1meg mpg file to everyone in the company 
(idiot). The other night she tried sending herself a 101meg attachment. 
What was she thinking??

Users are reporting their email checks are way fast now, 18 seconds down to 
4 seconds. Many say they don't leave mail on server, so they didn't want 
this old mail (that was usually marked as already read) but never knew it 
was out there, and had no way to do anything about it anyway.

Check TOP and see what your in.qpopper looks like for each user, you'll 
know pretty quickly who has a large email file without even looking in the 
directory.

Just some food for thought, or words to the wise[r than I], or bits for the 
bucket. Boy do I hate all those dumb sayings.

Jale