Clamping down on mailbox sizes...

[Michael Fox]

I'm a newbie, so take this for what it's worth.

Your question was setting quotas for some but not others. 

There are global quota rules.  You can override them with per user quota rules stored in the userdb. There are examples of both here:
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Quota/Configuration
That should be what you're looking for.

See also the quota service here:
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Quota
This can be used by postfix to test quota status before sending to dovecot, so you can reject the message rather than accept and then bounce.

When quota is exceeded, new mail is refused.

When folks are approaching or have exceeded quota, I use the quota rules to send them an email at their account, plus their external/alternate email address that we require when they register.  That way, they know there's a problem even if they don't check this account.

It's probably best to let them deal with which messages they want to delete.  Oldest is not necessarily the least important.

That said, we have a unique, slow-speed radio application for emergencies where we want to make sure certain POP mailboxes are empty.  This is so people don't log in at the beginning of a disaster and crowd the shared radio channel downloading old, irrelevant junk.  So we do expunge based on age.  And we send an email to them warning that old messages exist in their mailbox, and then also when they are expunged.  Again, this goes to their dovecot account plus an external address, just in case they aren't monitoring the dovecot account closely.

Michael



> -----Original Message-----
> From: dovecot [mailto:dovecot-bounces at dovecot.org] On Behalf Of SH
> Development
> Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 4:52 PM
> To: dovecot at dovecot.org
> Subject: Clamping down on mailbox sizes...
> 
> I don’t want to do this for all users….but…
> 
> I have a few users who insist that they use their mailboxes regularly and
> don’t want it cancelled.  Fine.  But they won’t clean them out either.
> 
> What steps would you all recommend for setting quotas on some users but
> not others?
> 
> Specifically starting out with identifying WHICH accounts have excessive
> amounts of crap in them, by age, then sending them a notice stating they
> are going to get limited, then deleting mail older than x number of days
> if they don’t do it themselves by a certain time frame...
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Jeff