I'm trying to understand how many Mailhandler Mailboxes I can create. I know there won't be any definitive number and it'll probably depend mostly upon the hardware but should I expect hundreds or thousands before getting performance troubles?

Also, my understanding is that I don't have a choice and I need to create 1 particular Mailhandler Mailbox to be associated with 1 particular Feed Importer. Is this statement correct? Is there any other way to scale it that I missed?

Any experience on scaling mailhandler / feeds importer would be really welcome.

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danepowell’s picture

danepowell commented

I think the bottleneck at large scales is going to be your IMAP/POP3 server- multiply the number of mailboxes you have by how frequently you are running the Feeds cron to get a rough idea of how many connections / minute you'll have to handle. Using back-of-the-envelope math, I'm guessing that a few thousand mailboxes being checked every five minutes should be possible, but it could put a significant load on your server. But that's really just a guess.

You don't need one mailbox per importer. Mailboxes and importers are completely independent, and are linked together by 'source' nodes. For instance, you could have one importer (for instance, the Mailhandler Quick-start importer), 100 mailboxes, and then 100 'Mailhandler source' nodes, each of which links one mailbox to the quick-start importer.

If you wanted to get really crazy, you could even have one catch-all email address / mailbox, one source node, and one importer, and then filter messages based on the original 'to' address.

anavarre’s picture

anavarre
Primary language French
Location 🇪🇺
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Thanks much. Crystal clear and I appreciate your time!

anavarre’s picture

anavarre
Primary language French
Location 🇪🇺
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