[Dovecot] Limiting size of stored emails

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 3/12/2013 11:30 PM, Patrick Joy wrote:
> Thanks for the reply.
> 
> I have been putting off an upgrade as I need to upgrade the complete OS
> which is not a trivial task unfortunately but is inevitable.

Debian is designed for rolling upgrades, thus Ubuntu should be as well.
 They're painless on Debian so I would assume the same for Ubuntu.
Which begs the question:  why have not been doing rolling upgrades given
your platform is specifically designed for such a model?

> I may need to setup a nightly cron job to check for files bigger than
> xmb in the mail store for now.

Probably a good idea.  As well as educating the user who attached a 4GB
file.  That's just plain nuts and smacks of ignorance.  Honestly I'm
surprised Outlook didn't crash when attaching such a file.

-- 
Stan


> On 13/03/13 15:07, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> On 3/12/2013 9:55 PM, Patrick Joy wrote:
>>
>>> Would appreciate some advice on this issue.
>>>
>>> I'm running dovecot version 1.0.10 on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
>> Ancient and no longer supported.  Upgrade to the latest 1.2.x or 2.x
>> that you can get from your distro ecosystem, or install from source if
>> necessary.
>>
>>> Recently a user created a draft email in their client (outlook) and
>>> added a 4GB attachment. The email was uploaded to the draft imap folder
>>> on the server. After this the client would then go into a endless
>>> synchronisation loop every time outlook was opened. For example in the
>>> most recent case 400GB of data was downloaded to the client when the
>>> user left outlook synchronising for 5 days.
>> First, beat the user with a heavy clue stick whilst educating said user
>> about sane attachment sizes, and use of things like FTP, burned DVD,
>> thumb drives, etc, for large file transfers.
>>
>>> I know this may be a bug with the client or client os however I would
>>> like to know if there is a way to limit the size of individual emails
>>> that can be stored in the imap store to prevent users creating huge
>>> drafts. There is no reason they should need an email draft of this size
>>> as it can never be sent through SMTP.
>> You cannot limit the size of individual emails written to IMAP folders
>> AFAIK, but you can limit the size of folders.  See:
>>
>> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Quota
>>
>