deleteing e-Mail, quota and dovecot

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 09:05, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 02:46:39PM +0100, Götz Reinicke wrote:
> > Now I'm getting the situation, that users exceed there quota but yet not
> > the hard limit and the user isn't able to delete messages.
> > 
> > e.g. the the soft limit is 100 MB, the hard limit is 110 MB. So there
> > should be some space to delete unneeded emails.
> 
> I'm not sure how dovecot works internally, but I know UW-IMAP makes
> temporary copies of the whole mailbox when the user is deleting
> stuff...  If dovecot does that also (seems likely) then you'll
> probably need to make the hard limit at least 2 x soft limit, to make
> sure a full copy of the mailbox can be made.

With mbox format there isn't much choice but to copy the whole
file to make any change.  Dovecot does have the option to
use maildir format instead and procmail knows how to deliver
to maildir.  The conversion might be a little drastic, though,
and you have to make sure anyone with a personal .procmailrc
adjusts it to write in maildirs.

I've always wished Dovecot or some other pop/imap program would
accept mail delivered in mbox format and have an option to
do an on-the-fly conversion to maildir as a user connects via
imap.   That would eliminate the trauma of conversions and
pop users could continue to use mbox format which is fine for
them.  It has to copy the messages anyway - it might as well
fix the format as it goes.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com