Users don't recieve a message when their mailbox (quota) is almost reached

mlkoekenberg's picture
Submitted by mlkoekenberg on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 03:37

Hello,

Where can I find this setting. My user don't get a message whe theirmailbox is alsmost full.

If a mailbox is full the sender recieves not a clearly error message. Somewhere is the line Can't create user output file.

Is there a possibility to send a clear message that says that the mail isn't recieved due a full mailbox?

Martin Koekenberg

Status: 
Active

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 11:00

Howdy -- you can setup notifications for quotas by going into Limits and Validation -> Disk Quota Monitoring.

With that, you can set what threshold they should be notified at, as well as how frequently to perform the quota checks.

mlkoekenberg's picture
Submitted by mlkoekenberg on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 07:22

I think that I looked over it. It's activated now.

What about the message when a mailbox is full? I think that this is more a feature request.

Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 08:53

Well, the trouble there is that once the mailbox is full, it's no longer possible to add additional messages into it for notifications such as that.

So, the key is to try and notify users before the quota is full.

mlkoekenberg's picture
Submitted by mlkoekenberg on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 09:08

I mean the message that the sender wil get when the mailbox of the reciever is full and the message can't be delivered.

Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 09:27

Aha!

I completely agree that the current error message sucks.

Unfortunately, that error message is hard coded into Postfix.

Some time ago, we really wanted to offer a nicer looking message that mentioned something about the quota being full... but after looking into it, we discovered that there's a table in the Postfix source code with a few hard coded error messages. It uses the return code from procmail to determine which of those error messages to show.

But the messages aren't configurable, and none of them specifically mention anything about quotas.

Alas, we haven't come up with a better way of handling that thus far. But, we'll keep that on our radar, as we'd love to use a better error than that if possible :-)

Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 09:50

Thanks for your input!

It's unfortunately a little trickier than that though...

While the generic text of the bounce message itself is indeed configurable, we don't know of a way to adjust that depending on procmail's return code.

So, it would be possible to change that generic text that's sent along with every bounce message. However, Postfix would still display "Can't create user output file" since that's what procmail is returning. And we don't know of a way to tweak that text to mention something about quotas when the procmail returns an error due to the quotas being full.

Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 10:58

There's a thread here with some folks that were trying to solve this particular quota issue:

http://nixforums.org/about152205-asc.html

In it, the Postfix author states:

When mailbox files are stored outside of Postfix (procmail, maildrop, Cyrus, and so on), there is no reliable way to report an over-quota condition back to Postfix.

That was a few years ago, there may be ways emerging to handle that. But, we haven't run into any yet! But we're not giving up, we'd like to see nicer error messages too :-)