[Dovecot] Simulating UW Snarf...

[Lorens]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 02:18:06PM -0500, Todd Piket wrote:
> I already wrote to Timo, but I thought some others on this list may have 
> had a similar situation.  So here goes:
> 
> The scenario at Michigan Technological University stems from long 
> standing traditions and policies that probably won't change.  That said, 
> two of the policies are 1.)we don't bounce mail and 2.)we guarantee 
> delivery when we accept a piece of mail.  The UW IMAP "snarf" capability 
> was nice because it allowed us to introduce file system, per user quotas 
> w/o worrying about the "INBOX" in an over quota situation.  This is 
> because the user could still read mail.  The delivered mail would get 
> "snarfed" from /var/mail/user when the user went back under quota.
> 
> In our test cases with switching to Maildir with Dovecot, we deliver 
> directly to the user's INBOX instead of /var/mail/user so what do we do 
> when the user is over quota because we can't bounce the mail?

Why do you do this?  What would be the problem with something
like

    default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u

which if I've understood correctly means that the user's stored
mail is in his home directory Maildir, while new mail is
delivered into /var/spool/mail/%u.

I've never had reason to try this, but these are obviously on 
different filesystems, and it seems to me as if it would be
functionally equivalent to having Maildir/new on a different
file system.

> After many lengthy discussions our thought was this.  Could we 
> symbolically link the user's "Maildir/new" to a non-quota file system 
> such that the move from "new" to "cur" would fail if the user is over 
> quota?

See Timo's response.

In a more general way, how do you deal with people keeping all
their mail in the INBOX? Is it only that it's annoying to have
your mail marked "new"?

HTH.