deleteing e-Mail, quota and dovecot

[Tony Nelson]

At 2:46 PM +0100 11/7/05, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?G=F6tz_Reinicke?= wrote:
>Hi,
>
>we run a RHEL4 E-Mail-Server with dovecot-0.99.11-2.EL4.1. we use mbox
>and most users use imap. So I have set quota for the devices where the
>user mailfiles are saved.
>
>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.
>
>Am i thinking the wrong way? Or how should the quota-system work in this
>situation?
>
>Thanks for any ideas!

Mbox is good for using less disk space and often faster searching.
However, an mbox is just a large file, and deleting anything from the
middle (though not the end) /requires/ making a copy of the file without
the deleted messages.  You might need a hard limit twice the soft limit.

Maildir keeps the messages in separate files, so it will take about 1.5x
the space of mbox and put more pressure on the filesystem (inodes!), but
messages are more easily deleted.

Eudora "deletes" messages from mbox files by just marking them in its index
file, and, when the wasted space gets too large, "compacts" the mbox file
by making a copy of it.
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