iMS5.2p1 quota questions/comments
Hi There,
While testing the quota mechanism on iMS52p1 on Solaris 8, I learned the following:
1. You can't tell the user what their quota is, or what
percentage is used.
2. Once the quota is exceeded, mail is no longer delivered.
The "grace period" defines at what point mail is bounced
back to the originator.
3. The worst part. After deleting a large mail message. The
mailbox was still over quota. The user has to wait for the
server-side clean-up process, before mail can be delivered.
This is especially bad in an IMAP environment. Deleting a
message puts it in the trash folder. The user then has to
"empty trash" to get the message deleted.
Has anyone "home-brewed" their own quota mechanism for iMS52? I would like a quota mechanism that allowed a grace period (say 3 days) that a user can be over quota and still recieve mail. In my environment, it's not that unusual for a person to get several large attachments, save them and delete the e-mail. I'd like to cleanly handle this scenario.
Is there a better way to handle quotas? Maybe a script running outside of iMS?
Thanks,
Roger S.
[1213 byte] By [
708715] at [2007-11-25 8:50:10]
1. That's correct, but it also depends on the client used. Netscape clients (Mozilla, Netscape 4.x, 6/7) uses the IMAP quota notification calls to let the server know with a pop up box that they are approaching their quota. Also Messenger express (The webmail interface) shows the current quota at the bottom of the page after login. I developed a portlet for my companies portal, so that when a user logs into the portal it uses their login to do a quick connect to the IMAP server to grab quota info to display to the user. We also developed our own web based application for white pages style LDAP lookup for emails and phone numbers and such. It also displays the users quota as well. So if you search for a particular user, it'll display that users quota percentage. One of the questions we got all the time was WHO bounced with over quota. With iMS 4.15 the bounce message didn't display the user that was over quota, with 5.x is does, so it's not used too much for that reason, but it's still useful to see.
2. The users is also warned when they are approaching the quota. This is difficult to test though, because if you are sending a message that instantly goes over that quota, they won't get the warning, only the over quota message.
3. Yes, that is the intended operation. different IMAP clients treat the delete differently though, and I'm sure you can find one that will delete the message immediately, but I can tell you from a user perspective, both have downsides. I prefer to put in trash and empty trash on exit. I can also right click on the trash can and empty immediately. Also the fact of the matter is that once they do empty their trash, they will get their messages, so it's up to the user to clean out their mailboxes. I run into this all the time, so I know the problems with the users, but sometimes you just need to laydown the law :)
You haven't said what you _WANT_ to see happen. All of this is pretty normal stuff really and works the way I think it should work. I would suggest you increase the quota enough to be comfortable (I use a 15MB quota with a 5MB attachment size limit) make sure to set up the IMAP clients to put in trash and empty on exit and that will fix number 3. You can't really do anything with number 1, other than provide the users with an easy web page or something to find out what their quota is. You'll also need to train your users that the Sent mail folder on the server also is included in their quota usage.
