On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Dustin Sallings wrote:

dustin> 	Somebody did, it's Cyrus.  Given the limitations of the UNIX mail
dustin> format, there's not a lot you can do.  However, for the few decent mail

Change the mailbox format.  I had the same problem on a FreeBSD box (with
'ahem' 120meg+ mailboxes) until I shifted to an imapd capable of
supporting maildir format (which qmail and exim deliver to, and pretty
easy to set up a global procmailrc to fake it under sendmail).

Standard unix mailbox format is one flat file.  maildir is a seperate file
for each message, meaning that your imapd (you can pick one up from
www.qmail.org which (I think) groks mailbox and maildir) doesn't try to
suck the entire mailbox into memory.  ( Cyrus doesn't do this, but its
still a flat file )

Still, if you are really serious about doing mail, a full database
solution might be the answer.

--==--
Bruce.

(aside, DJB can be annoying, but he does (sometimes) have good ideas ;) )