General IMAP functionality

[Earl R Shannon]

Hello,

Comments are imbedded below.

Warrick FitzGerald wrote:
> Posted this last night, but did not see it come through ... sorry about 
> the re-post if you have this already.
> 
> 
> ============
> 
> I’m in the process of moving an office of POP3 users to IMAP, and 
> realized that that I don’t fully understand how things normally work.
> 
> Our mail is currently hosted on an ASP basis and when a user is running 
> out of disk space they receive an email saying you’re running out of 
> space. I tested what happens on the IMAP side, and using Mozilla 
> Thunderbird I get a message popup saying pretty much the same thing, but 
> I only get this once I’ve run out of space.
> 
>   1. Can I set Cyrus to prompt when the users’ mailbox reaches 90% usage?
	Yes. The server sends what the IMAP protocol calls an ALERT. The client 
is responsible for handling it accordingly. This usually means a POPUP. 
You'll need to look through the imapd.conf man page to see how its set.

>   2. Is it possible to email an admin account when this happens? Many
>      users don’t understand how to free space on the server and need
>      assistance (save the comments please J ).
	 No, Not with the native software. We've written a script that
will go through and send a message to the user letting them know that 
they are filling up and generate a list of those people which then gets
sent to the admins.
> 
> Now here’s the part I don’t fully understand. As far as I can gather 
> you’re responsible for moving mail off the server onto you local machine 
> on some regular interval. Outlook seems to have this “Archiving feature” 
> that’s responsible for this, but I’m not sure if this is the Microsoft 
> way of doing things, or the right way of doing things.
	Yes, the user is responsible. The IMAP protocol makes not effort
to make this happen. Any ARCHIVE feature such as you mention is a 
function of the client software.
	
> I don’t seem to find an “Archive” feature in Thunderbird. What am I 
> missing here?
	See above. The whole point of IMAP is to store the messages
on the server. Keeping below an adminstratively imposed quota is the
users responsibility. Sadly, not all users are responsible. :)

> 
> Thanks
> Warrick
> 
> ---
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Another space issue that new IMAP users sometimes have difficulty with 
is the Trash model of deleting stuff. This is a client configurable 
thing so some people see it, others may not. But they move a message
to Trash when they delete and don't empty the Trash. It will still use
their quota.  And if they keep copies of sent messages on the Server,
same deal. They use quota.

Have fun.

Regards,
Earl Shannon
-- 
Systems Programmer ,Information Technology Division
NC State University.
http://www.earl.ncsu.edu

Anonymous child "Some people can tell the time by looking at the sun,
		 but I have trouble seeing the numbers."
---
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