Yahoo Watch: Unlimited Mail reaches its Limits?

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“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.”