1 message per mailstore?

[kirme3]

I have been playing around with the distribution list options for Zimbra and I ran across something that confused me. We are going to set up a list with 1000's of accounts in it(testing seems to be working just fine for it so far). We are wanting to use this to minimize the number of messages on our mailstores. According to the Zimbra whitepapers, and the wiki, if a message is sent to a bunch of people, Zimbra will only create 1 message and hard link the rest to it. After sending the message on our test servers, I checked the inode and hard link info for the new messages. From what I am seeing, it looks like it maxes out at 50 hard links and I'm guessing another file is created and another 50 hard links, because all users get the message. Is that the way it's supposed to work? Is that just a limit of hard links? Where are the original files stored? I'm just curious, it doesn't make a difference either way.

Also(this may be a question for another thread), is there a maximum number of accounts we can add to a distribution list?

[martin.marcher]

Originally Posted by kirme3

According to the Zimbra whitepapers, and the wiki, if a message is sent to a bunch of people, Zimbra will only create 1 message and hard link the rest to it.

afaik zimbra is using the Cyrus IMAP Server as a backend. I've seen installations with a single Cyrus Server with 100.000+ Users and there wasn't any Problem (the hard link option is used by default in cyrus)

Meaning: The base components Zimbra chose are really stable and caring about such details only will get you into trouble and headaches

My best guess is that hard linking depends on the file system you use - as a wild guess in the dark i can imagine that ext2/3 have more limitations than say xfs or jfs as they are a bit younger iirc and have been designed with more recent demands of todays servers - but I think you should google up the specs there to be sure.

[kirme3]

It doesn't make a difference for me, it was just something I noticed and thought I would ask. The only reason I checked in the first place was because my boss wanted me to be sure that is how it worked. Thanks for the info.

[dkarp]

Originally Posted by kirme3

I have been playing around with the distribution list options for Zimbra and I ran across something that confused me. We are going to set up a list with 1000's of accounts in it(testing seems to be working just fine for it so far). We are wanting to use this to minimize the number of messages on our mailstores. According to the Zimbra whitepapers, and the wiki, if a message is sent to a bunch of people, Zimbra will only create 1 message and hard link the rest to it. After sending the message on our test servers, I checked the inode and hard link info for the new messages. From what I am seeing, it looks like it maxes out at 50 hard links and I'm guessing another file is created and another 50 hard links, because all users get the message. Is that the way it's supposed to work? Is that just a limit of hard links? Where are the original files stored? I'm just curious, it doesn't make a difference either way.

I believe that this limit of 50 recipients is configured at the postfix level to avoid timeouts.