limiting the size of user mailboxes in /var/spool/mail

how to?

[jamie]

hi,

some of the users on our redhat box are massing up MBs of mail, by not regularly downloading. is there a way to put a limit on each mailbox?

can i also delete these enormous mailboxes by copying /dev/null into each large mailbox:

cp /dev/null /var/spool/mail/user?

thanks

<added>
we use sendmail and procmail, and i have just found out that procmail obeys user quotas, so i just have to set up disk quotas. anyone know any good help pages for that?

[jamie]

well after much experimenting i think i have enabled quotas, but they don't work.

i have created aquota.user and aquota.group in the root folder / of the primary partition and have enabled quotas in fstab and then rebooted:

/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,usrquota,grpquota 1 1

a quotacheck -vm /dev/sda1 runs fine, and edquota -u myuser allows me to edit the quota setting for that user.

however when i try edquota -g mygroup it returns:

Failed to turn on quotas : quotaon: using //quota.user on /dev/sda1: No such file or directory

and when i try quotaon -v /dev/sda1 it returns:

quotaon: using //quota.group on /dev/sda1: No such file or directory
quotaon: using //quota.user on /dev/sda1: No such file or directory

does anyone have any clues?

much appreciated

<added>

well ther's nought like trying. and i just succeeded in setting up quotas for all users on the system. quotacheck is now running by a cronjob.

* the only thing i am still confused about is how quotacheck then notifies either me (root) or the user that they have too many files. in an ideal situation it would notify me, as i am the admin?

* and i am still unsure as to how to use the quotas to control the /var/spool/mail/usermailboxes

am still grateful for any feedback

[jamie]

sorry for posting three times, but as noone answered i just carried on investigating and have just about managed to do it all (i'm sure there's a lesson to be learnt there ;-)

all i had to do was enable quotas on the second partition whose root directory was /var and then set the quotas accordingly.

now each users mailbox in /var/spool/mail is also limited! :-)))

still not sure how quotacheck will notify me (or them) but that's not so important for the time being. the main thing is the mailboxes can't run away from me.