[Dovecot] Simulating UW Snarf...

[Todd Piket]

I already wrote to Timo, but I thought some others on this list may have 
had a similar situation.  So here goes:

The scenario at Michigan Technological University stems from long 
standing traditions and policies that probably won't change.  That said, 
two of the policies are 1.)we don't bounce mail and 2.)we guarantee 
delivery when we accept a piece of mail.  The UW IMAP "snarf" capability 
was nice because it allowed us to introduce file system, per user quotas 
w/o worrying about the "INBOX" in an over quota situation.  This is 
because the user could still read mail.  The delivered mail would get 
"snarfed" from /var/mail/user when the user went back under quota.

In our test cases with switching to Maildir with Dovecot, we deliver 
directly to the user's INBOX instead of /var/mail/user so what do we do 
when the user is over quota because we can't bounce the mail?

After many lengthy discussions our thought was this.  Could we 
symbolically link the user's "Maildir/new" to a non-quota file system 
such that the move from "new" to "cur" would fail if the user is over 
quota?  What will Dovecot do in that failure situation?  Do you have 
other suggestions?  I would be more than willing to develop a patch that 
makes this an option in the config file.  Probably similar to allowing 
the indexes and control files be on a non-quota file system.  Again, it 
would only allow "Maildir/new" to be on a separate file system, not the 
whole "INBOX".  I hope this conveys the idea well enough.

Any thoughts or ideas the list provides would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Regards,

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| Todd Piket                        | Email: todd at mtu.edu    |
| Programmer/Analyst                | Phone: (906) 487-1720  |
| Distributed Computing Services    |                        |
| Michigan Technological University |                        |
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