Hi, IMHO, quotas on mail file systems are a bad, bad idea. You don't ever want to loose email because a file system filled up or a user hit their quota (something they can't control if they aren't around to check email).
Disk is cheap, buy more if your mail spool starts filling up. I use a 8 GB mail spool for 3000 users (with another 8+ GB in reserve). During the worst time in the summer when the students are gone, it will get about 30% full. If it ever gets to 50% full, I will add more disk. For those POP users who insist on using the "leave mail on server" option, I have a perl script that will read a standard mbox format file and delete messages based on different criteria (I didn't write the script). I run a cron job every week that deletes any message that has been opened for reading AND is more than 30 days old. This keeps the old drek cleaned out of the mail spool. The user community knows about this policy. ** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D PHONE: 207-872-3659 ** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill, FAX: 207-872-3076 ** Waterville ME, 04901-8842 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 12:53:18 -0400 From: "Alan W. Rateliff, II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Subscribers of Qpopper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Filesystem quotas ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Kolos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Subscribers of Qpopper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 9:17 AM Subject: Re: Filesystem quotas > What is this "boundary condition" and when does it come up? > We have the temp dir on a non-quota filesystem, and on the spool dir users > have a hard quota 100k more than the soft quota. > Yet we still occasionnally end up with a user with a corrupted mail spool > because somehow it went over quota, and when qpopper copies the spool back, > it gets corrupted. > I have tried turning off the X-UIDL writing, but that hasn't helped. Imagine a user with a 5120k hard quota, and 4.9MB in their mailfile. QPopper copies that mailfile over to the non-quota filesystem to POP it out, and while the user is checking his/her email (and apparently NOT deleting it from the server) they receive a 200k email. Now there's 200k in their mailfile, only 4.8MB available. The POP session is over and QPopper copies the .pop file back into the mail spool. 0.2MB + 4.9MB = 5.1MB > 5.0MB: the user is now over quota, and the last 100k or so is lost. That was my concern. But frankly, I don't like my users leaving their mail on the server. But that's not an entirely practical requirement when some people have multiple machines/people checking the same box (which I recommend multiple boxes with aliases) or using webmail as their primary or only mail viewing agent. But, that's what happens. I haven't decided if it would be nicer to have quota systems installed in the local mail delivery agent or not, as it would require a separate database of user quotas. I think procmail can do that, but I'm only beginning to learn about it. -- Alan W. Rateliff, II
