At 8:28 AM -0700 8/5/07, Don Russell imposed structure on a stream
of electrons, yielding:
FORMER 03 | Baltasar Cevc wrote:
Hi everybody,
I'm planning to set up our new mail system using the Dovecot mailbox
server. It mostly works fine yet (it's quite straigt forward to set up,
I'd say), but there's a thing I haven't been able to find out yet. We
provide POP3 access for all users, but want to restrict IMAP access to
some of them (because IMAP users tend to leave more messages on the
server, thus increasing storage needs).
[snip]
1 - storage is cheap - Costco sells a 1 TByte external drive for
approx $US 300. That holds a LOT of e-mail. The 500 GByte is less
than half that price.
Storage in most business environments costs a lot more than the price
of consumer-grade disks. Physical disks are a minor component of the
true cost of providing storage in an available, reliable,
maintainable, restorable, flexible, and auditable manner.
2 - why not enforce quotas? I assume you could set quotas by user.
Quotas are an administrative hassle even when they work technically.
In many places they also are a poor proxy for the real policy need of
retaining (and removing) mail based on age.
POP users could opt to keep a copy on the server, so that doesn't
guarantee anything.
There are sites which handle that through policy which they enforce
automatically and the use of Maildir. With Maildir, a script that
removes messages once they've been retrieved and/or are older than a
certain age is a pretty simple and efficient matter.
I prefer IMAP because then I can access the same mail from different
clients computers...
IMAP certainly provides more flexibility for users, but sometimes
that flexibility is not needed or is specifically unwanted.
--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
