[Dovecot] Limiting size of stored emails

[Patrick Joy]

Thanks for the reply.

I have been putting off an upgrade as I need to upgrade the complete OS 
which is not a trivial task unfortunately but is inevitable.

I may need to setup a nightly cron job to check for files bigger than 
xmb in the mail store for now.

On 13/03/13 15:07, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 3/12/2013 9:55 PM, Patrick Joy wrote:
>
>> Would appreciate some advice on this issue.
>>
>> I'm running dovecot version 1.0.10 on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
> Ancient and no longer supported.  Upgrade to the latest 1.2.x or 2.x
> that you can get from your distro ecosystem, or install from source if
> necessary.
>
>> Recently a user created a draft email in their client (outlook) and
>> added a 4GB attachment. The email was uploaded to the draft imap folder
>> on the server. After this the client would then go into a endless
>> synchronisation loop every time outlook was opened. For example in the
>> most recent case 400GB of data was downloaded to the client when the
>> user left outlook synchronising for 5 days.
> First, beat the user with a heavy clue stick whilst educating said user
> about sane attachment sizes, and use of things like FTP, burned DVD,
> thumb drives, etc, for large file transfers.
>
>> I know this may be a bug with the client or client os however I would
>> like to know if there is a way to limit the size of individual emails
>> that can be stored in the imap store to prevent users creating huge
>> drafts. There is no reason they should need an email draft of this size
>> as it can never be sent through SMTP.
> You cannot limit the size of individual emails written to IMAP folders
> AFAIK, but you can limit the size of folders.  See:
>
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Quota
>