linuxext3 andvarspoolmail round 2 3561

We know - that's what's causing your problem, in a certain sense. The same inode is experiencing continual file growth, hence fragmenting as it hits the extra pre-allocated limit time and again. You could simply move and copy all the files back at midnight, thus changing inode. End of problem.

Or you could use maildir format instead of mailbox, thus obtaining files which never grow, and thus avoiding the problem.

As to your complicated solution with putting the mailbox files in different directories - I don't believe it will help one bit (well, maybe ONE bit :-). The files will still be growing beyond their preallocated limits, and fragmenting if there's not enough room left before the next file starts.

Nevertheless - you could try it. We usually have the mailboxes in alphabetically designated subdirectories (and where we have digits in the id, we use a hundred per dir). Automatically generated symlinks take care of getting there from top if needed for an app. Maybe you could try hard links and see how that goes (hic. belch. foolish suggestion - do not touch). Users shell variable MAIL can be set to whatever absolute mailbox path you like, which takes care of most local shell business. The symlinks take care of the rest.

Peter