[Dovecot] Question regarding layout.

[Curtis Maloney]

Johan Hendriks wrote:
> Hello all.
> I have a question regarding my mail flow.
> 
> We have some users who are in a mail group (alias), and these alias 
> receives a lot of attached documents.
> So i have the document in all the mailboxes of the alias.
> If the attached document is 2MB and that is not rare, i have 10 times 2 
> MB on my mail server.
> Is there a way to tackle this.
> Maybe by making the alias a mailbox itself and give other users acces or 
> are there other options.

I understand that, if you're using Maildir, Dovecot deliver can be smart 
and lay down a single file, and hardlink or symlink it to each folder, 
thus having one physical copy for N users.

The documentation on dovecot's LDA mentions the -p option which will 
hard-link when using maildir, if possible, specifically for this case.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA

> Also i have very lame and lazy users.

Don't we all, mate? :)

> They refuse to clean thrash cans (i asked about that earlier,and got 
> that tackled through the expire plugin.),also the do not remove old mail 
> not even reading it.

> So is there also a option to remove mail that is not been opened, and is 
> older than xx days or weeks.

There's expire (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire) though I'm 
personally in favor of Quotas -- even if you only go as far as making 
users request an expanded quota when they reach their limit, it makes 
them realise how much they're using, AND makes it a chore...

Another thing to look into is the zlib plugin.  If you're using mbox, 
this will allow you to use compressed, read-only folders.  If you're 
using Maildir, it allows you to compress individual messages. 
http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Zlib

Someone recently posted a tool to implement something close to the 
process described at the bottom of that page.

--
Curtis Maloney