[ale] Email quotas

[Chris Fowler]

Yesterday I "lost" another server.  The problem is that we deployed some 
equipment at the same time and they are dying together.  This system had 
a bad CPU fan.  After pulling and replacing it is back up.  I'm looking 
at its responsibilities and we are looking at moving our mail "system" 
to the a virtual machine at Rackspace.  In doing so I need to serious 
consider controlling the size of IMAP folders and am looking at ways to 
implement a "quota" system.  One simple idea is nothing more that a Perl 
script that runs each night collecting the size of ~/mail of all the 
users and then mailing a report to those that are over the limit.

I will explain our current system.

Earthlink is the MX for our domain.  Some of you may have Earthlink for 
your web server and that is basically what we do.

Our mail "server" is the mx for opsdc.com and the server for all our 
users (servers and employees).

There is a fetchmail process running for each user that uses POP3 to get 
email from Earthlink.  It is then processed through procmail to be 
backed up and sorted into IMAP folders.  It also goes through 
spamassassin.

The users run mostly Outlook (not me) and treat this server as their 
IMAPS and SMTP relay.

In December I backed up my ~/mail and created empty files for each 
folders to start fresh.  My backup was 6GB!  I save everything.

I like using the fetchmail system because I can tweak the rc files for 
each user with a custom download interval.  We are planning on moving 
mail for the real domain onto the mail server and will no longer need a 
fetchmail process.  We will continue to use procmail.

Now on the Perl script idea I could also run a process that would 
execute mutt and then tell mutt to purge emails marked as deleted.  Our 
users may delete stuff, but since they don't see it in Outlook it may be 
months before it gets purged.

I'm targeting a guest machine at Rackspace that is no more than 
512M/20G.  The OS will take about 1.5 leaving most of the rest for 
email.  I doubt I could get these guys to be responsible enough to allow 
me to do a 256M/10G.  I do need to do a space usage survey on what we 
are using now in those folders.

Chris