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Quotas on the Central Mail Server

  Arnaud Taddei IT/DIS (for the Mail Support team)

Along with your account on the Mail Server you have been allocated some disk space so that you can store your folders remotely and thus benefit from the location independence feature of the service. If you store your folders on the Mail Server you can travel and still access them remotely.

Of course, as on any system where users are sharing disk space, it is important to control its usage by allocating quotas. This should not be seen negatively. Our goal is not to cause problems, but, as this measure is accompanied by the right management tools, it should encourage you to identify no longer relevant mail messages and help you to keep the amount of information stored in your folders under your control instead of being controlled by the flow of information!

Quotas on the Mail Server work in a similar way to AFS. Every user of the Mail Server has by default a quota of 10 MBytes. Quotas are controlled by group administrators who are given a group allocation and have been asked to manage your quotas. Your group administrators can reset your quotas to whatever values you agree with them.

Mail Server quotas have, however, nothing to do with the quotas you have on NICE (Novell system) or on AFS. Do not confuse them. If you want to know your Mail Server quota simply connect to your Mail Server by following the instructions at:

and once connected, enter the command:

	quota

What happens when you are approaching your quota limit?

In most cases you will receive a mail message informing you about this and suggesting that you free some disk space. Our advice is try to resist the temptation to ask for a bigger quota but to determine instead if you are wasting disk space, e.g. with some large message that was sent to you but is no longer relevant (see below).

Even when you are "over quota", new mail messages will not be refused. However you will not be able to store or file any messages you have read and a copy of your outgoing messages will not be filed on the mail server. Also, if you are processing mail automatically using 'enable-filter' (calling procmail), this tool will not be able to file any more messages to your Mail Server folders.

If you connect to the Mail Server as mentioned above you can use several commands to give you some indications as to where you are wasting space. Commands like:

	list-myfiles
	folders-status 

To read more about what you can do and look at examples, read:

Sometimes you might want to delete a folder on the Mail Server yet keep its contents somewhere. Please remember that any IMAP client gives you the possibility to download a folder to your local system (like NICE, AFS, VMS, your local machine's disk, a disquette, etc.) so that you can keep it as an archive.

In the future, tools to archive folders will be provided so that you can organise a real archiving schema for yourself and/or your colleagues.