2003-02-18T14:49:19 George Kahler:
o can be increased to as much as 1 inode for every 4 K (maxfiles)
You may want to pursue that. I just checked my archive of 28,613 messages, and I've got a mean filesize of 5,892 bytes. NB that's by taking actual file sizes, not blocks used (which rounds up of course).
Of course, if you have anything _else_ besides pure maildirs on that toaster, you may have no troubles; anything else will probably bring the mean up. My overall system mean, including bin and lib dirs, and piles of rpms, logs and all, computed using blocks used (i.e. rouding up) is 30,559 bytes/file.
Oh, and I get less bloated traffic than many folks enjoy exchanging; nearly all my email is pure straight US-ASCII text/plain.
Probably be worth your while to strike a mean over your actual users' mailbox-filling habits, and find _their_ mean messagesize.
Here's a quick-n-dirty mbox mean-taker:
formail -s wc -c|perl -lne 's/\s//g;$s+=$_;$c++;END{print($s/$c)}'
formail comes with procmail. You can concatenate all your user's mboxes and pipe them into an instance of that.
-Bennett