[Dovecot] Quota problems on uidlist files

[James Nunnerley]

Hi All,

Please excuse me for this somewhat a slightly uneducated explanation of
a problem we are experiencing.  I'm more a web developer rather than a
sysadmin, and have only recently been looking at how exactly dovecot
works.

We're having a problem when users/groups quotas are reached on our
server platform.
Our platform bases quotas on groups - i.e. domains, so a single user has
a user username and group of their domain; and the domain has a set
amount of space available.

This means that if they then try and access their email, via either imap
or in most cases webmail, it would seem that dovecot is unable to create
the dovecot-uidlist file - which makes complete sense, because it's
running as that user and under the group as detailed above..

We've tried changing a pre-existing file to have group ownership of
nobody, but from what we can gather, this file is not actually updated,
but deleted and recreated when changes occur.

One solution would be to take the dovecot-uidlist file out of the mail
directory structure, on which the quotas are enforced, but this is not
configurable in dovecot.  Alternatively, having someway of changing to
ownership of the file would also get around this problem.

Does anyone have any experience of either a work around for this, or
something which we can change in dovecot that will allow users to create
a dovecot file, even if they are over quotas?

Many thanks
James

James Nunnerley
Applications Developer
Namesco Limited