Earl R Shannon wrote:
Hello,
Comments are imbedded below.
Warrick FitzGerald wrote:
Posted this last night, but did not see it come through ... sorry about the re-post if you have this already.
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I’m in the process of moving an office of POP3 users to IMAP, and realized that that I don’t fully understand how things normally work.
Our mail is currently hosted on an ASP basis and when a user is running out of disk space they receive an email saying you’re running out of space. I tested what happens on the IMAP side, and using Mozilla Thunderbird I get a message popup saying pretty much the same thing, but I only get this once I’ve run out of space.
1. Can I set Cyrus to prompt when the users’ mailbox reaches 90% usage?
Yes. The server sends what the IMAP protocol calls an ALERT. The client is responsible for handling it accordingly. This usually means a POPUP. You'll need to look through the imapd.conf man page to see how its set.
2. Is it possible to email an admin account when this happens? Many users don’t understand how to free space on the server and need assistance (save the comments please J ).
No, Not with the native software. We've written a script that
will go through and send a message to the user letting them know that they are filling up and generate a list of those people which then gets
sent to the admins.
Now here’s the part I don’t fully understand. As far as I can gather you’re responsible for moving mail off the server onto you local machine on some regular interval. Outlook seems to have this “Archiving feature” that’s responsible for this, but I’m not sure if this is the Microsoft way of doing things, or the right way of doing things.
Yes, the user is responsible. The IMAP protocol makes not effort
to make this happen. Any ARCHIVE feature such as you mention is a function of the client software.
I don’t seem to find an “Archive” feature in Thunderbird. What am I missing here?
See above. The whole point of IMAP is to store the messages on the server. Keeping below an adminstratively imposed quota is the users responsibility. Sadly, not all users are responsible. :)
Thanks Warrick
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Another space issue that new IMAP users sometimes have difficulty with is the Trash model of deleting stuff. This is a client configurable thing so some people see it, others may not. But they move a message
to Trash when they delete and don't empty the Trash. It will still use
their quota. And if they keep copies of sent messages on the Server,
same deal. They use quota.
Have fun.
Regards, Earl Shannon
Thanks Earl,
That's what I was afraid of. Sounds to me like the people who aren't going to "get" this concept should keep using POP3 :)
1. Does anyone have "best practices" that I can share with users on how they should move mail off the server when their quota is exceeded?
2. What is considered a reasonable quota (I know this is a very broad question)? When working with POP3 I would allocate users a max of 50 MB, when does a mailbox have so many messages that it puts a burden on the server?
Thanks Warrick
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