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.