[Dovecot] Well, "Hard filesystem quota can also be problematic"

[Jeroen Scheerder]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 16.8.2005, at 09:16, Jeroen Scheerder wrote:
> 
>> Apparently, v4 of the IMAP protocol has a QUOTA extension for this; 
>> it's reported as a CAPABILITY.  I think some of that is documented in 
>> [1].  Am I wrong in suspecting that this is a higly desirable, or even 
>> a required, piece of the puzzle?
> 
> 
> I don't think it's exactly needed as few clients use it. But Dovecot has 
> a quota plugin available for it and it kind of works. Currently it has 
> implemented only one way to track quota though: just read all files and 
> sum their sizes. This should work fast enough with mboxes, but not a 
> good idea with maildir. Other implementations will come later..
> 
> Tomi has written something about how to use the quota plugin in 
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA

That, if I'm reading correctly, is for systems on which for some or other 
reason one cannot use file system quota's, but still wants to make Dovecot 
handle quota enforcement.  The page you're referring to (also) discusses a 
plugin for that.

What I'm looking for, though, is to actually use file system quota.  I would 
have thought reporting file system quota in the way I described above would be 
helpful, but reading your words I'm having second thoughts about that.

Which kind of leads me to think that I seem to be looking for problems that 
may not be there; perhaps file system quota's, along with a solid delivery 
agent (such as procmail) and a strategy of making sure there's sufficient 
storage for mailbox writes by the imap server, as sketched before, will suffice?