Re: Email Box Quotas - Quick Survey

[Charles Buchholtz <chip+educause () SEAS UPENN EDU>]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2010 at 01:30:38PM -0400, Feehan, Patrick wrote:
> Quick Survey:
>
> What are your email box (inbox, sent, trash) limits/quotas?
>
> Do you have a policy/standard/process for changing the limit for certain users?


Our inboxes are unlimited.  My thinking is that, if a vital incoming
message is refused with "inbox full", we really can't do anything to
retrieve that message.  Also, I didn't want, for example, a student
who is unable to complete an assignment on time to fill the
instructor's mailbox so that no one can submit their assignment,
thereby getting an extension.

Our inboxes live on separate file systems that we keep well under 50%
full.  If they start filling up the on-call admin gets paged.  That
hasn't happened for more than ten years.

We do have a limit of 250 MB on messages older than 30 days, to
discourage people from leaving an infinite amount of mail in their
inbox.

When someone has more than 250MB of messages older than 30 days, we
transfer the oldest messages to a new mail folder and send them a
message telling them where their old messages went.  We send people a
warning the week before, so that they can delete or file messages
according to their own system rather than having us file the messages
for them.

The 250 MB rarely causes a problem.  Some people are annoyed, but a
few people think that it's convenient to have their old mail
automatically archived.  Sometimes people will say, "I'm busy, please
don't move my mail until I have a chance to deal with it."  We always
grant such requests.

250 MB of old mail plus this month's mail can be over a GB.  Disk is
cheap, but when we raised the old mail limit over 250 MB we started
getting complaints that "mail was slow".

All other folders (sent, trash, spam, automatically moved messages,
and any folders that the user creates) are stored in the user's "home
directory", which they also use to store files, documents,
preferences, etc.  It is mounted on all lab machines and can be
mounted via CIFS/SMB on any machine on our local network.  Old
messages in the trash and spam folders are automatically deleted after
one week.

Home directory quotas are 4 GB for students and 10 GB for faculty.
Faculty can buy more space for themselves or for their students, for
research.  Students doing independent studies are given more space on
request.  Staff, chairs, and deans are given as much space as they
need to do their work.

If the user is over quota when we automatically move the old messages
from their inbox, we just cram the new folder in and put them further
over quota.  If someone is over their disk quota, we will give them a
temporary quota increase so that they can clean up.

Most people are used to email services with hard limits on mailbox
size.  We sometimes use the simple explanation, "inboxes are limited
to 250 MB".

--- Chip

Charles H. Buchholtz                    Director of Systems Programming
chip () seas upenn edu            School of Engineering and Applied Science
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~chip           University of Pennsylvania