Disk quotas on INBOXes

[Bill Davidsen]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> 
>    Our user e-mail INBOXes are sitting in /var/mail/[user].  Does anyone 
> know of a way for me to institute per-user quota on their INBOXes?  See 
> our problem is that while I can apply user-quotas on /home/[user], that 
> doesn't take into account what's on /var/mail/[user] ... and some users 
> are leaving their e-mail sitting in their INBOX because they don't want 
> to eat up their user quota.  So, I want to limit the size of their INBOX 
> file as well, through quotas.
> 
>    Possible?
> 
You have had a number of good suggestions, but I hope you have management 
support before limiting mail. You should be able to set a mbox size limit on 
incoming mail, that's why you get "mailbox full" messages. That's probably the 
best way to handle it.

I wrote a small tool which will remove some oldest messages from a mbox format 
file, based on either the size of the file or the number of messages. I use it 
to clean out my folders rather than on the mbox itself, but it will work on a 
mbox, it has the locking to to do so, since I wrote it for that reason years 
ago. I would add logging so it's clear that you didn't lose the mail, it was 
deleted because of user inattention.

Of course with the price of disk these days, I have to wonder why space is so 
tight. If this is non-business mail, tell the users to get a gmail account. ;-)

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot