[Dovecot] mdbox and filesystem quota

[Timo Sirainen]

On 18.3.2012, at 23.52, Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz wrote:

>>> "Expunging a message only decreases the message's refcount. The space is
>>> later freed in "purge" step. This is typically done in a nightly cronjob
>>> when there's less disk I/O activity. "
>>> 
>>> What happens if there is filesystem hard quota that is exceeded? Will
>>> dovecot allow to delete mails to free space without a need to wait for
>>> cronjob to do the purge?
>> 
>> No. Also the purging itself won't work, because it needs to write new data
>> first before it can delete old data. Don't run out of disk space!
> 
> Can dovecot treat soft quota like hard quota for user then?
> 
> Or better enforce quota based on filesystem quot information. With xfs I can 
> set quota but turn enforcement off. All fs quota counters work but no 
> enforcement is being made by xfs itself.

Yes, Dovecot does the quota enforcement itself. I'm not entirely sure if it uses soft or hard quota though.