Subject: Email account on Dante

From: "Sakrison, Rod" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 97 16:30:00 PST

My email account has been returning "Disk space Exceeded" statements despite 
the fact I reduced my messages in my inbox from over 500 to just 75.  Is 
this an accurate message or is something else system-wide happening?  I have 
been having progressively more trouble over a three week period.

[email-masked]

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 03:13:37 +0100 (CET)

These "quota"-related question seem to occur at least twice a week.
Shouldn't there be some kind of hint in the FAQ? I couldn't find one.

On Mon, 3 Mar 1997, Sakrison, Rod wrote:

  >My email account has been returning "Disk space Exceeded" statements
  >despite the fact I reduced my messages in my inbox from over 500 to just
  >75. Is this an accurate message or is something else system-wide
  >happening? I have been having progressively more trouble over a three
  >week period.

What you describe as an "email account" is, of course, a directory on a u*ix
system. As a matter of fact, you probably don't just do email with it, but
also ftp, www etc. Therefore, all files you download onto your account (i.e.
onto the part of the hdd that hosts your home directory) affect the amount
of disk space available to you.

Your sysadmin has decided to limit the amount of disk space available to you
to x MB, using a program like quota. The message you're getting doesn't say
"delete emails like hell", but simply tells you that there isn't any space
left in your home directory.

Now, the first thing to do for you is to check your quota. Try man quota for
further info (or whatever "quota" program you're running).
You'll then want to try 

	cd 	#This gets you to you to the top of your home dir
	df	#This tells you how much free space there is right now
	du	#This shows you which dirs take how much space

The last command is especially interesting, since e.g. Netcrap tends to pile
up huge amounts of cached data in a hidden dir ".netscape". Consequently,
you'll want to remove those files/dirs that you don't need and that take
the most space.

Well, since u*ix is an OS (as opposed to DOS, which is just a bunch of
%&(/%!"), you're in for some nasty surprises if you toy around with the rm
(remove) command without reading the instructions first. There is *no*
undelete function. So "man rm" before you decide to do some major pruning.
Be especially cautious about things like
	rm -rf 
unless you intend to start from scratch :-)

You might also nag your sysadmin into re-compiling pine with    

	USE_QUOTAS
          Determines whether quotas are checked on startup. Default is to
          not check the quota.

Cheers,
Robin

  Robin S. Socha	  | Bonner Talweg 56  | Tel:   +49 228 22217-8
  Political Science Dept. | 53113 Bonn        | Fax:   +49 228 22217-9
  Bonn University  	  | Germany           | email: [email-masked]

       On the package it said: "Requires MS Windows 3.11 or better"  
	       			      ...  so I got myself Linux.