On Sun, 06 Mar 2016, Shawn Highfield wrote to All:

 SH> Having never used *.msg until very recently for anything more then 
 SH> netmail I was wondering what some of you set your purge limits in 
 SH> DB to? I currently have them set to 500 messages, but was 
 SH> wondering what the limits to DOS / D'bridge were? 

DOS used to have a limit where it slowed down a whole lot with more than X
files in a directory... i forget the number but it was run into when JAM
areas were introduced and folks were placing all of their echos into one
directory... huge slowdowns lead to complaints... splitting the areas to
something like 100 per directory (400 files since each JAM base is made of
4 files) resulted in much faster speeds...

DB has/had a limit of something like 32000, IIRC, but that was, again IIRC,
removed or increased...

i look at it like this... traditional DOS has 8 characters for the file
name so it should be able to handle up to 99999999.MSG with 0.MSG being the
highwater mark or lastread holder if one wants to look at it like that... i
also started to suggest that 00000000.MSG matched with 0.MSG but they are
definitely two different file names ;) 

as far as limits, i much prefer to purge on "time of arrival"
instead of some arbitrary number of messages or based on the date the
message was written...

my two centavos FWTW ;) 

)\/(ark