[Dovecot] Posfix and Dovecot (dovecot like LDA) and no space left on the disk

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 5/9/2011 10:37 AM, Petr Svacina wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Please I have a question:
>
> If my server is out of space (disk full) and  the postfix is LDA, the new messages a deffered or refused,so postfix send 450 to sender ...
> But When I use dovecot (1.2.16) like LDA, postfix accept message (even there is no space), forward to dovecot, dovecot REFUSE the message and message is lost !
>
> How can I solve this ? I don't want tu use quota and the disk was full, because of the other problem ....

This is more of a mail server admin 101 issue than a Dovecot issue. 
Putting your log, mail spool, and user mail directories on separate 
partitions, physical disks, or SAN LUNs will prevent such a problem from 
occurring 99% of the time, assuming you have planned and sized your 
storage appropriately for your environment.  At minimum you should have 
your spool and user mail storage on different partitions.  To avoid this 
issue the other 1% of the time, use monitoring or log summary tools to 
notify you of disk space usage so you know when you're close to running 
out of space.  For instance, I receive the following as part of my daily 
logwatch summary on my personal domain MX:

  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda2              33G  4.2G   28G  14% /
  /dev/sda1              92M  8.4M   79M  10% /boot
  /dev/sda6              94G  1.2G   92G   2% /home
  /dev/sda7              94G   25G   70G  26% /samba

Note that I have both system logs and the mail spool on / but user mail 
directories in /home.  This setup is acceptable for a low volume server. 
  For a high volume server the mail spool should be on a dedicated 
partition, as well as user mail dirs.

If you already know all of this and an unforeseen issue caused your 
problem, accept my apologies for preaching to the choir.

-- 
Stan