[Dovecot] Quotas Done Right?

[Kev]

We have our 'incoming' mail areas and the users mailstore on seperate disks.

New mail is stored in an unquotad spool on one disk (meaning they can 
have as much mail as they like delivered within the systems hard disk 
capacity) and on login its moved onto a quotad disk along with the rest 
of their mail.

So they're quota'd on the mail they keep hanging about, but if they go 
over quota any new mail is held in the spool until they sort themselves 
out. So no mail should be lost.

We use mbox but I guess you could look at it in terms of maildir as 
having the new/ folder symlinked pr mounted on an unquotad disk for 
spooling and all other folders (including cur/) on the normal quota'd 
mail area.

Not perfect, but works reasonably well for us. Only problem being when 
people ignore the soft limit warnings and hit their hard limit / expiry 
period. They then can't even delete mails to clean their mail up so have 
to contact us.

When we can get users to reliably read instructions we'll be happy :P

Kev


Marc Perkel wrote:
> I'm just wondering about a quota system. How would that work?
> 
> I want to limit mail box sizes - but I don't want users losing any 
> email. Seems mutually exclusive.
> 
> So - how is this done in the real world? Automatic warnings?