[Dovecot] Catch22: user needs space to fix out of space condition

A mail user reported that he filled up his INBOX (despite reminders he was approaching his filesystem quota), and furthermore, he could not fix the situation because he couldn't expunge message he marked for deletion.

The dovecot logs revealed the cause

dovecot: imap(user): Error: open(/var/mail/user.lock) failed:
	Disc quota exceeded

This created an impasse where a user cannot free space because he needs to create a lock file that cannot be created because he needs free space. Is there any way out of this without administrator intervention?

Joseph Tam jtam.home@gmail.com