Re: qpopper && quota
Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> In article <cistron.Pine.LNX.3.96.990108142313.1002A-100000@linux1.tf.ipen.br>,
> =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=E1rio_Ol=EDmpio_de_Menezes?= <mario@curiango.ipen.br> wrote:
> > I have a Debian box as a pop3 server for some users at the Dept.
> >The server has one scsi disk, with three main partitions (/ /home /other).
> >This is a poor design, but was done some years ago, when I was just
> >beginning with Linux.
> > I have set quota for users in / and /home so I can prevent the
> >spool area to hog all disk space with tons of messages with megs of
> >attach. The problem is that when some user with a little more than the
> >half of its quota tries to get e-mail via pop3, he/she gets a quota
> >exceeded message, because the qpopper do a temporary copy of the mail file
> >after it changes to the user/group of the user requesting the pop.
>
> The temporary files used to be in /var/spool/mail. Exactly for this
> reason, I modified the Debian package to store the temporary files
> in /var/spool/pop. So if you make sure /var/spool/pop is on another partition,
> there is no problem. For example, remove /var/spool/pop, create a
> /other/pop directory and make a symbolic link from /var/spool/pop
> to /other/pop.
>
> Note that there stillis another problem - if the popper copies the
> mailbox to /var/spool/pop, a new message comes in, and the user
> exits the POP client without modifying/deleting any messages you
> might end up with with a mailbox over quota and lost messages anyway.
> I cannot see any workaround for this - hopefully it won't
> happen too often :/
>
> > 3. Is there some other pop server that behaves different?
>
> No, unless you move to maildir format, which isn't supported
> by most of the debian mailers and none of the pop servers.
None of the pop servers? qmail-pop3d (which comes with qmail-src) works great for me.
> Perhaps we could fix this in potato. I'm getting the experience
> nessecary for this since I am moving the whole mailspool of
> our ISP over to maildir format in the next few days.
Yes. Wouldn't it be nice if everything used maildir? Then you could actually
manipulate your own mail with shell scripts. I believe debian should switch over
complete! If you check out the qmail site there are patches to all kinds of programs
to add support. Besides, adding support for maildirs should be cake (unless you're
working with particularly hard to read/follow code) because deleting a message is
simply an unlink() call and marking a message as read is as simple as a rename() call.
What could be easier? Perhaps we need to lead the charge to get everyone to use
maildirs.
--
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com
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