[Dovecot] Quota handling - opportunity for new Feature?

[Gabriel Millerd]

On 5/22/07, Charles Marcus <CMarcus at media-brokers.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Your taking control of my email and not delivering it?
>
> That is not what I said - it is delivered - the system admin simply
> prevents the end user from seeing it unless/until they rectify their
> over-quota condition.
>
   Unlikely the user will see the difference in deliver and received.

   I am envisioning a situation like this "Sales Droid: sold send me
that quote", "techdata rep: sending, hear back from you soon",
<server: receipt received && receipt delivered>, mail sent to 'B'
folder. At that moment I am getting called on where the mail is and I
get to watch an episode of Sales Droid: CSI.

> > In my experience this would cause both a potential backlash and a
> > people resending mail.
>
> I don't see how that would be a problem... the user will see *something*
> in their Inbox, and unless they are a *total* moron, they will actually
> *read* the message that is generated - especially since it will have a
> subject yelling at them in all caps that they are over quota.
>
   If SalesDroid is on the phone with someone and wants a document and
doesn't get the document, but the sender gets receipt for the document
temperatures rise, then the SalesDroid heads to gmail and emails
themselves a message 'test message to my crappy mail server' and he
gets it (because its small and fits under the radar temperatures rise
further and the request to 'send it again' or what not occurs and the
'B' folder starts getting packed.

>
> I'm guessing that dovecot could over-ride the Quota limit to inject
> small system generated messages like over-quota - so, forget about the
> folder 'a'...
>
   Ummm, it can override the quota if its not a filesystem quota. If
its a filesystem quota touching the disk gets tricky, even differences
in types of buffered IO gets gross. But yes with a quota like
Maildir++ you need a LDA that will honor the quota accounting system
and a popmail and imap server that will as well. You could simple
alter the dovecot LDA script to drop a small textfile in
~/Maildir/new/ manually. Tweaking it to not be obnoxious which is why
I remove the previous alert and replace it with a new one.

> How about every time a message comes in while the user is over-quota,
>
   I would assume people would go spastic about the INBOX spam, not to
mention quickly adding these messages to a filter even. You really
need to delete the previous messages I think unless this is a daily or
less infrequent thing I think.

>
> I'm not sure what you mean - most systems I have seen are configured to
> reject mail for users who are over quota. I know that postfix can be
> configured to soft-bounce, which is a part of what I'm talking about...
>
   I see, I guess with a Hotmail or what not this might work. I would
rather 450 quota issues since they will get resolved soon. Just like
greylisting you can just have the sender's email message try again
later gracefully.

> But I'd like a nice, clean, simple way for users to:
>
   With pop-mail this was easy, because you have bulletins. Lots of
issues with imap.

-- 
Gabriel Millerd