Increasing inodes without recreating file system

[Robin Bowes]

Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 7:52 AM +0100 7/27/05, Robin Bowes wrote:
>  ...
> 
>>I'm now using /home for other things, e.g. /home/apache has all my
>>websites, /home/vpopmail has all my mail, and I've used up all my inodes.
> 
> 
> It seems to me that there are also a lot of files in your home directory;
> might they also be email?

No - all my email is in /home/vpopmail/domains/robinbowes.com/robin/Maildir

It is true however, that I can potentially clear out a lot of chaff from 
my home directory to save a few inodes and I will indeed do that.

> 
> I think what you need is an email program that uses mbox format to store
> the messages.  Each mbox file can contain thousands of messages (or more).
> 
> Mbox is just all the messages concatenated in one file, with a blank line
> between, and a standard first line to each message.  For efficiency, it
> needs a second index file.  Many bogus complaints about it exist, but you
> are finding out now why putting each email in a separate file is not a good
> idea (just good for demoware).  There are other proprietary formats to keep
> multiple messages in single file, but its often easier to import into them
> than get the messages back out when you want to switch to another email
> program.

I am aware of the mbox mail format but, being a hardened qmail user, I 
was brought up on maildir and am quite happy using it.

The problem is that I manually adjusted the inode allocation when I 
first created the file system as I believed that I would only be storing 
relatively few large flac files on there.


> All:  Robin seems to be using Thunderbird, which I google as using mbox
> format, so why is he having inode troubles?  Uhh, I'm new to all this, so I
> don't quite get where vpopmail comes in.  Would he have 2 copies of each
> email, one in Tbird and another in the vpopmail directory?

I use Thunderbird on my clients to read mail/news, but all my mail is 
stored on my server and accessed over imap using bincimap.


> All:  Would a loop device volume (man losetup) to store his email be the
> simplest way out of this mess?

Erm, no.

Thanks for the suggestions.

R.