Subject: Re: Sysadmin task: limiting INBOX??

From: "Mike Brudenell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 10:10:45 +0000

--On Tue, Dec 16, 1997 1:14 pm +0000 "Lynne Seamans"
<[email-masked]> wrote: 

> My users are getting carried away with incoming mail, and I
> would just like to know what's the easiest way to control
> the amount of space used up by an INBOX?
> 
> Running Solaris 2.5 and have tried setting user quotas
> on /var.  SENDMAIL ignores them and appends incoming mail
> anyway.  Have tried symbolic link of /var/mail/userid to
> a file in userid's home directory, but all mail gets bounced
> complaining of the link...  Others have suggested PROCMAIL
> as a delivery agent, but that sounds very difficult..
> 
> Any ideas?

We faced exactly the same problem a year or so back on our Silicon Graphics
IRIX system that acted as our IMAP/mail server.  Recently we have moved the
server onto a Sun Solaris 2.5.1 system and re-implemented the changes we
made...

Firstly you should note that it is (probably) not sendmail itself that is
actually performing the final delivery into the user's INBOX folder. 
Usually sendmail uses an external program to do this: typically it is
/bin/mail with the (usually undocumented in the man page) "-d" option; under
Solaris it might also be /usr/lib/mail.local.  (This latter is a
deliver-only agent, and hence may be more secure as it doesn't have all the
reading code baggage that /bin/mail carries.)

It _might_ be that reconfiguring sendmail to use the "other" of these two
utilities for final delivery _may_ solve your problem of the delivery agent
ignoring the quotas you have turned on and set up.

However what we have done here is to use the "tmail" program that is
included in the IMAP utilities kit.  This is designed as a drop-in
replacement for /bin/mail and is built using the IMAP server's underlying
C-Client mail folder handling library.  This means it should interwork well
with your IMAP server as regards folder locking etc.

You can find the IMAP utilities kit at:

    ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-utils.tar.Z

Note that you will also need the C-Client code for the IMAP 4 distribution;
the latest version can be found at:

    ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-4.1.BETA.tar.Z

If you need help reconfiguring sendmail to use a different delivery program
please check the sendmail documentation.  Assuming you are using the m4
pre-processor based configuration available in current versions of sendmail
this is relatively painless to do and is described in the accompanying
documentation.  For additional information or help please ask in the
comp.mail.sendmail Usenet News group.

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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