Yahoo Unlimited Mail Fills Up
The Wall Street Journal’s tech blog reports trouble with Yahoo mail. Namely, it seems that keeping several years’ worth of e-mail in a Yahoo “unlimited” inbox causes a nasty error and the vanishing of all that mail.
Thanks to the Journal’s high profile, a fix is now expected in “a month or so.”
Last I heard, which was not terribly recently, Yahoo was running a modified version of Qmail as their back-end. (Please correct me if there’s more recent information.)
Qmail works with Maildir-style storage, in which each message is its own file in a directory. Having 55,000 files in a directory is not prohibitive. If they’re running a filesystem with a shortage of inodes, that might be a sticking point, but you’d think a large company offering unlimited e-mail would think of that. In one archive folder on my server I have 186,373 messages at the moment.
Qmail supports per-user storage quotas, too. Until your inbox-filling-up problem is sorted out, Yahoo, you may want to read this FAQ.
You might also want to read this one:
What exactly does unlimited storage mean?
Unlimited storage gives normal email account users like you an opportunity to not have to worry about hitting a storage limit.
Sorry, that was snide. Realistically, my guess as to what broke is the indexing of the messages, not the storage. Personally, I have a non-fatal but serious allergy to storing my data on computers to which I don’t have physical access.
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