Why is deliver.db so large?

Having a large deliver.db (on the order of tens of megabytes) is not uncommon, since a record is kept of every message that goes through lmtpd (so that duplicate suppression can do its work), so there’s a lot of data there.

Note also that it is common for databases to have unused space that may not be immediately recovered for performance reasons (this is the case with Berkeley DB and Cyrus Skiplist) You can control the size by increasing the frequency at which it gets pruned.