[Dovecot] the right way to delete mailbox/user home

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 17:36 +0200, Davide Vaghetti wrote:

> we are using dovecot with mdbox to provide mail services for a community
> of 1000 academic users. We have quite a big turnover of guest users, so
> we often have to deprovision the allocated resources, that is the
> mailboxes. Given that the users are virtual, and that the mdbox
> directory is located in the home directory of each virtual user (static
> userdb), is it ok to simply delete (rm -rf) the home directory to get
> rid of the mailbox? 

As long as you haven't enabled a separate attachment storage
(mail_attachment_dir) it's safe to rm -rf.

> Could the delete, without say a dovecot reload, be
> harmful for dovecot processes and the like?

No need to reload or anything. Other than the attachment storage, there
is no global shared state across users.