[Dovecot] Maildir++ quota inconsistency

Magnus Holmgren holmgren at lysator.liu.se
Thu Aug 31 18:00:15 EEST 2006


On Thursday 31 August 2006 15:25, Anand Buddhdev took the opportunity to say:
> I've found what I think is an inconsistency in the Maildir quota
> implementation. According to the Maildir++ quota specification at:
>
> http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/README.maildirquota.html
>
> Maildir++ quota can be specified as maximum size, or maximum number of
> messages, or even both. The size specification is supposed to be in bytes.
> So I could use '10000000S' to set a quota of around 10MB.
>
> Now, the Exim MTA has an independent Maildir++ quota implementation, and it
> follows the specification, so if I set the quota in Exim to 10000000, it
> will work perfectly with sqwebmail and courier-imap. However, it doesn't
> play well with Dovecot, because Dovecot chooses to interpret the quota as
> kilobytes, rather than bytes. An example:
>
> If I set the quota to 10240 in Dovecot, it creates a maildirsize file with
> the value 10240000 in it. If I then set the quota to 10M in Exim, Exim
> calculates that as 10485760. It detects that the value in the maildirsize
> file is wrong, and recreates the file with a quota of 10485760 bytes.
>
> Exim's behaviour is consistent with the courier family of packages, as well
> as the specification, so I'm venturing to say that Dovecot's implementation
> is slightly non-standard, and should be fixed so that the quota setting is
> interpreted as bytes, and not as kilobytes, to avoid a situation like the
> above.

I'm not sure I understand you. Both Dovecot and Exim interpret the contents of 
maildirsize correctly, don't they? The problem seems to be that the quota set 
in Dovecot's configuration doesn't match the quota set in Exim's 
configuration. You can always get them to match up by setting the quota in 
bytes in Exim, but it would have to be a multiple of 1000 bytes (1 kB). So 
you want to be able to specify the quota in bytes in Dovecot as well, so that 
you can use any number, and, in particular, Exim's K and M shorthands (which, 
unfortunately, mean kibibytes and mebibytes, respectively) in its 
configuration file?

Aside from this, I wonder if Exim really should change the quota specified in 
a maildirsize file, and not just use it as the default value for a 
newly-created maildir. Isn't the maildirsize file the best central place to 
store per-user quotas?

-- 
Magnus Holmgren        holmgren at lysator.liu.se
                       (No Cc of list mail needed, thanks)
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