large inbox, unable to read emails

[asmithjr]

I have a customer that insists on having a large inbox. Why, because he is not using all of his space and it should be fine.

I tend to agree however, I constanlty have trouble and it appears the inbox being so large keeps him from being able to download to his PC. Now every account in his office is working fine and today he calls once again.

I can get on his webmail (takes forever) but see his email.

What can I do to help with this outside of
1. Tell him to go find another host
2. Tell him to clean his inbox
3. delete the inbox ( we did this once and mail started flowing again)

Seems to me this is a problem but cannot find a solution.

By the way his mailbox is 167MB large. I made sure the trash was empty so this is just inbox.

[webignition]

If this person really wants to have all their mail on the server, you might be better of using IMAP instead of POP.

With mail stored sensibly in IMAP folders on the server, this person wounldn't need to keep all his main in the inbox.

[asmithjr]

yep wish there were other options.

[PWSowner]

I've seen that problem with huge mail files myself. What I did once was download the file, zipped of course, to my computer, split it into 2 files, inbox and inbox2, reuploaded, and they became readable.

[asmithjr]

I used a perl script to slit them
perl -pe 'BEGIN { $n=1 } open STDOUT, ">out.$n" and $n++ if /^From /' inbox

then put the current month back into inbox. made it 11mb and this worked.

Problem is, How do I get the customer to have access to the others. or the inbox2.

Does anyone know if we can really support large inboxes? we have the ability to create large accounts and even set the limit of the mailbox, not to mention set it to unlimited to use the entire 2GB account (if our account is set to that)

[chirpy]

As webignition mentioned above, IMAP is the protocol that should be used if a user wants to leave email on the server. POP3 simply was not written to be used in that way, it should be retrieved and deleted in total on a regular basis, never left on the server after being read.

[asmithjr]

I've not used IMAP as far as I understand.

The customer is using MAC and PC, this account happens to be PC. I believe Outlook Express is being used.

How do I set it him up to use IMAP? I'll continue reading.

[chirpy]

When you create a new account in OE you can select what type it is POP3/IMAP/HTTP.

[scottc]

Albert,

I used your perl script to split a large inbox and it worked great. Can you give me some sample code for putting parts of it back together? For example, I want out.300 through out.500 appended in a single file.

Thank you.

Scott