--- Please enter the report below this line. --- If you attempt to open a mailbox that is over 2 GiB in size, alpine will refuse to open it, stating 'Folder "INBOX" opened with 0 messages' Pine 4.64 had the same behaviour previously. Debian Release: lenny/sid 500 unstable www.debian-multimedia.org 500 unstable mirrors.kernel.org 500 unstable http.us.debian.org --- Package information. --- Depends (Version) | Installed =====================================-+-==================== libc6 (>= 2.7-1) | 2.7-10 libkrb53 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2) | 1.6.dfsg.3~beta1-4 libldap-2.4-2 (>= 2.4.7) | 2.4.7-6.2 libncurses5 (>= 5.6+20071006-3) | 5.6+20080419-2 libpam0g (>= 0.99.7.1) | 0.99.7.1-6 libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5) | 0.9.8g-8
I'm forwarding this Debian user's bug report to the alpine-info list. Is this a known issue in Alpine? I imagine it is a c-client issue; is it a known issue there? The "LFS" tag in the Debian bug means that this issue relates to large file support. If possible, please reply to all so that the Debian bug can pick up on any conversation here.---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:59:19 -0400 From: Mike Dresser <mdresser_l@windsormachine.com> Resent-From: Mike Dresser <mdresser_l@windsormachine.com> To: submit@bugs.debian.org Resent-To: debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org Resent-cc: Asheesh Laroia <asheesh@asheesh.org> Resent-Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:03:02 +0000 Resent-Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:03:06 +0000 Subject: Bug#478545: [alpine] alpine does not support large (>2 GiB) mbox's Package: alpine Severity: normal Tags: lfs--- Please enter the report below this line. --- If you attempt to open a mailbox that is over 2 GiB in size, alpine will refuse to open it, stating 'Folder "INBOX" opened with 0 messages' Pine 4.64 had the same behaviour previously. Debian Release: lenny/sid 500 unstable www.debian-multimedia.org 500 unstable mirrors.kernel.org 500 unstable http.us.debian.org --- Package information. --- Depends (Version) | Installed =====================================-+-==================== libc6 (>= 2.7-1) | 2.7-10 libkrb53 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2) | 1.6.dfsg.3~beta1-4 libldap-2.4-2 (>= 2.4.7) | 2.4.7-6.2 libncurses5 (>= 5.6+20071006-3) | 5.6+20080419-2 libpam0g (>= 0.99.7.1) | 0.99.7.1-6 libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5) | 0.9.8g-8
The report is correct. The c-client library makes no attempt to use the
64bit system calls; and thus flat files are limited to 2GB.
The recommended solution for mailboxes with aggregate size greater than
2GB is to use mix format instead of a flat file format. Even if c-client
were updated to use the 64bit system calls, flat files (especially in
traditional UNIX format) do not perform well at multi-GB sizes.
If there is some compelling reason offered, I will consider 64bit support.
However, as of right now, I am highly skeptical that the benefit would be
worth the effort, especially since there is a superior solution for large
mailboxes available now ("superior" since it will always work better than
a large flat file).
That would explain why ipopd has the same issue (reported that as well today, #478549) Fixing that would enable large mailbox downloads though, and would fix alpine at the same time. This bug report and #478549 should probably be merged and moved to a c-client issue then as they both use c-client? I think the large file support would be a good idea, since clients such as Icedove usually work just fine with very large mailboxes. If someone were to use fetchmail or something similar to grab their >2gb Gmail/whatever account all at once to a local mbox, they would be unable to download it to another mail client via pop3. Mike
You're welcome. I'm glad that we are in agreement on this point. Fortunately, this isn't true! Nothing prevents the user from creating an alternative-format INBOX. The simplest way to create a mix-format INBOX in Alpine is to save a message to #driver.mix/INBOX and then exit Alpine. When Alpine is restarted, it will see the mix-format INBOX and then automatically start transferring messages there from the spool directory.
Thanks for the confirmation. That's true. Well, on a system where the mail setup is configured by the sysadmin, one's only way to read mail might be an enormous /var/mail/$USER that has exceeded two gigabytes.
But what if the spool is already >2GB?
Yes, in that case, you have to do some external recovery to break the file into smaller chunks. The split program is useful for this purpose. By the way, I recommend that mixcvt be used instead of mailutil or Alpine's snarfing for converting a mailbox. This is because mailutil and Alpine will do an atomic move of the messages from the spool file, thus putting them all into one mix data file. mixcvt will divide the messages into multiple files.