Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
Our user e-mail INBOXes are sitting in /var/mail/[user]. Does anyone know of a way for me to institute per-user quota on their INBOXes? See our problem is that while I can apply user-quotas on /home/[user], that doesn't take into account what's on /var/mail/[user] ... and some users are leaving their e-mail sitting in their INBOX because they don't want to eat up their user quota. So, I want to limit the size of their INBOX file as well, through quotas.
Possible?
You have had a number of good suggestions, but I hope you have management support before limiting mail. You should be able to set a mbox size limit on incoming mail, that's why you get "mailbox full" messages. That's probably the best way to handle it.
I wrote a small tool which will remove some oldest messages from a mbox format file, based on either the size of the file or the number of messages. I use it to clean out my folders rather than on the mbox itself, but it will work on a mbox, it has the locking to to do so, since I wrote it for that reason years ago. I would add logging so it's clear that you didn't lose the mail, it was deleted because of user inattention.
Of course with the price of disk these days, I have to wonder why space is so tight. If this is non-business mail, tell the users to get a gmail account. ;-)