Following Philip's suggestion, I have a seperate program now which
scans the user INBOXes and if any are over quota writes a special
message (once) to the INBOX. This runs every 2 hours by cron.
I have also added a check into the Washington IMAP server software to
send an IMAP ALERT if the user is over-QUOTA.
How often to alert is the question as most clients only
reduce the INBOX in size at a specific command or on exit. It
would be useful to ALERT a user if the INBOX went over while they
were on. This is not possible for POP systems.
If anyone would like a look at the code, let me know.
We have not yet had enough experience of running USER mail
quotas. There are only 37 out of 10500 users over.
It is interesting to see that some are over by a lot.
Note that I have modified EXIM to keep delivering until INBOX
is over quota rather than delivering if there is enough room
for the message. A sample from the log file :-
2000-08-28 02:30:01 user u01ray INBOX 5623942 quota 5242880
2000-08-28 10:30:00 user u38cg INBOX 5297448 quota 5242880
2000-08-28 12:30:01 user t01bpm INBOX 18902191 quota 5242880
2000-08-29 14:30:02 user t10pf INBOX 6902879 quota 5242880
2000-08-29 18:30:01 user t05fr INBOX 5754223 quota 5242880
2000-08-30 10:30:00 user ub9sm INBOX 5477534 quota 5242880
2000-08-30 16:30:01 user u14smr INBOX 5608579 quota 5242880
2000-09-01 10:30:01 user u10jch INBOX 8109293 quota 5242880
Another aspect is that one user simply deletes the message I
add so that the user gets another at the next check - some people!
It will be interesting to see how things go once term starts.
At the moment the quota system is only on the student server.
It may have proved too much of a culture shock for staff to
bring it into their server at the same time. We
used mailclean and consequently no messages were ever rejected
even if a user was "over quota"; old messages just fill up their
home filespace when they were cleaned away. Now they have to do
the MAIL management themselves or else messages are deferred, etc.
If anyone has experience of running a similar USER mail management
system, please let me know how it functions.
