Question about Server-Load

[gszauer]

Hi all,
First, let me just say im a simple web designer, i might be asking a completely off-topic question, or a question that makes no sence. If that is the case, i apologize in advance.
I work at a company that provides hosting as a service, and we offer clients the option of having web mail. We want to steer the clients away from using web mail tough.
For clients that do use web mail, we are currently offering Squirrel Mail, which looks awful. I want to convince the systems administrator at my company to change to Roundcube, but i need some info so i can present my case.
So my first two questions:
1, Is there a way to limit the attachment size of an email using Roundcube?
2, The biggest concern we have against using web mail is people receiving tons of mail with large attachments, and that being a heavy load on the server. Is there a way to prohibit users from downloading attachments using Roubdcube? Perhaps display a message like "Please use a local email client to download this email."

With that being said i realize this question is vague, but does anyone have any information (Documentation, serverlogs, ect..) proving (or disproving) that Roundcube would have less of a server load than Squirrel Mail?

Thank you for your time
~Gabor

[bpat1434]

Currently I think RC might have a higher server impact that Squirrel Mail unfortunately.  But I do know that a lot of the processing is done client-side rather than server side.  The main things that the server (and I'm talking web server, not email server) would do is interpret the response from the mail server.

Dealing with attachments is tricky.  I'm not sure of any real "easy" way to enable/disable attachments without hacking the code a bit.  I do know that RC does have some problems with attachments; although, they very well could have been fixed.

As for limiting attachment sizes, RoundCube doesn't create limits because then the limits would change if you used Squirrel Mail or Thunderbird.  So RC leaves it up to both PHP and the smtp server for attachment size.  PHP has a file upload limit as well as a memory limit.  Just make sure that there's enough memory to upload what you want, and then a little bit more.  So if you wanted to allow 5 MB uploads, you'd probably want your upload limit to be around 6MB and your memory limit to be around 10 or so (conservatively).  Every SMTP server is different with the max size of attachments, so I can't say how to handle that.

Hope I answered your questions.

[gszauer]

That was pretty much the answer i was looking for.
Thank you very much! i appreciate the quick response.
~gabor:)