Freebsd quota & sendmail

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Fri Feb 29 06:29:07 UTC 2008



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Derek Ragona
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:49 AM
> To: Ofloo; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Freebsd quota & sendmail
>
>
> At 12:29 PM 2/27/2008, Ofloo wrote:
>
> >I'm putting this under freebsd because there is no forum for
> sendmail, and it
> >does concern freebsd as well.
> >
> >My problem is this, when i set quota in /var/mail directory to
> each user and
> >this user creates a cronjob, that doesn't forward all data to
> /dev/null, and
> >keeps on generating mail, ..
> >
> >Well after a while the mail file reaches it's quota and sendmail isn't
> >allowed to write to that file anymore, so it will start and fill
> the mailq,
> >..
> >
> >The point is after a while the whole system will just crash what can I do
> >about it, sorry for rambling.
>
> Why are you setting these quotas on /var/mail.  These days with disk so
> cheap, why bother?

It depends on how he has his server setup.

Suppose he had a 250-employee company where for reasons of
data security (remember the courts have ruled e-mail is
company documentation and subject to document retention
laws) everyone is running IMAP to the mailserver and
most of the employees are very lazy about deleting old
mail, or downloading attachments they get to local
systems (or better yet, NOT using the e-mail system
as a file-sharing network, good luck with that) and he
has a 200GB hard disk.  I can see the desire to limit people
to 500-700MB per mailbox.

The other thing is with a server, the disk space is usually
a lot more expensive because it's raided or mirrored, it's
high-speed drives, etc.

Ted



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