[Dovecot] mbox file location

[Mark E. Mallett]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 09:24:16AM -0700, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 02:37, Faisal wrote:
> > Is it a good idea to have the mbox file in user home directories rather then
> > /var/mail/ ?
> 
> We have many users who like to leave all their mail in /var/mail for
> ages.  It's a problem, because some software understandably hates large
> mbox files.

[Having already responded, this lets me make take both sides...]

I can recall one positive thing about having inbox in /var/mail in the
past.  In cases where the inbox is unrestrained by filesystem quotas
(e.g. if there are no filesystem quotas or if the local delivery agent
runs setuid root), you can do some special things.  One thing we did
here was to have the LDA look up the user's inbox quota, and if the new
message would be the one to put the mailbox over the limit, the LDA
would first insert a special notice that said something like "the next
message puts you over quota; all further messages will be
[bounced/deferred] until you get back under quota."  If the mailbox was
already over quota, it would (bounce/defer) the new message.

You can't really do that if the LDA runs as the end user and is
constrained by quotas.  You also can't do it if the LDA is responsible
for autofiling incoming messages into different folders.  Since we do
the latter here, the most consistent thing is to have the inbox in the
home directory.

mm