Christian Balzer wrote:
> Revisiting what I wrote yesterday and considering what the most likely
> rationale behind using a quota_<time> retry rule (to give people that
> are actively using their mailbox a grace period, defined by a
> subsequent quota retry rule, in which to remove mails and make
> space), I'm gonna try for the following, provided nobody stops me
> with a very good argument:
>
> Just base the last access time of a maildir mailbox on the last
> modify time of the "new" directory. Obviously this is either the last
> time exim was able to deliver an email (classic case of mailbox slowly
> filling up) or the last time the user/client did read a new message.
> This of course does not check for users/clients reading or moving
> around old emails, but then again a user with a _full_ mailbox just
> staring blankly at the never changing picture or a client
> auto-connecting every 5 minutes and leaving the mails on the server
> makes very little practical difference to a totally inert user.
I don't know if it's the same for every OS out there, but this is what I had
thought would work a while back - the directory containing the messages gets
it's access time updated whenever a new file is delivered. This means that
the time of the "new" folder would denote the last new message received, or
the last time a new file was modified/moved in some way - so either a new
message was delivered, or even better, the user checked messages and read a
new message. The time on the "cur" folder would be another folder to check
since it may be possible the user didn't get any new messages, but just took
a read message and marked it for deletion or changed some other type of
flag. So it would be best to take the newest time of the two as you can see
here:
drwx------ 2 mail mail 16384 Jun 23 12:55 cur/
drwx------ 2 mail mail 4096 Jun 23 12:50 new/
drwx------ 2 mail mail 4096 Jun 23 12:55 tmp/
All I did was deliver myself a new message at 12:49, then at 12:50 Outlook
checked email and so the message was moved from new to cur. Then at 12:55 I
just marked the message for deletion.
Eli.
