Quotas

Cyrus IMAP features a flexible Quota scheme with support for limiting various resources, such as storage or number of folders or messages.

Monitor and Repair

Quotas may be monitored and repaired via the quota(8) command:

Controlling Quota Behavior

How restrictive quotas will be may be tailored to the needs of different sites, via the use of several settings in imapd.conf(5):

lmtp_over_quota_perm_failure: 0

If enabled, lmtpd returns a permanent failure code when a user’s mailbox is over quota. By default, the failure is temporary, causing the MTA to queue the message and retry later.

lmtp_strict_quota: 0

If enabled, lmtpd returns a failure code when the incoming message will cause the user’s mailbox to exceed its quota. By default, the failure won’t occur until the mailbox is already over quota.

quotawarn: 90

The percent of quota utilization over which the server generates warnings.

quotawarnkb: 0

The maximum amount of free space (in kB) at which to give a quota warning (if this value is 0, or if the quota is smaller than this amount, then warnings are always given).

quotawarnmsg: 0

The maximum amount of messages at which to give a quota warning (if this value is 0, or if the quota is smaller than this amount, then warnings are always given).

autocreate_quota: -1

If set to a value of zero or higher, users have their INBOX folders created upon a successful login event or upon lmtpd(8) message delivery if autocreate_post is enabled, provided their INBOX did not yet already exist.

The user’s quota is set to the value if it is greater than zero, otherwise the user has unlimited quota.

Note that quota is specified in kilobytes.

autocreate_quota_messages: -1

If set to a value of zero or higher, users who have their INBOX folders created upon a successful login event (see autocreate_quota), or upon lmtpd(8) message delivery if autocreate_post is enabled, receive the message quota configured in this option.

The default of -1 disables assigning message quota.

For consistency with autocreate_quota, a value of zero is treated as unlimited message quota, rather than a message quota of zero.

Quota Database

Quota information is stored either in a database (i.e. twoskip, skiplist) or in “quotalegacy” format, which is a filesystem hierarchy. This is controlled by the quota_db setting in imapd.conf(5). Here’s more about the pertinent settings:

quota_db: quotalegacy

The cyrusdb backend to use for quotas.

Allowed values: flat, skiplist, sql, quotalegacy, twoskip, zeroskip

quota_db_path: <none>

The absolute path for the quota database (if you choose a single-file quota DB type - or the base path if you choose quotalegacy). If not specified will be configdirectory/quotas.db or configdirectory/quota/

Converting Quotas Database

The cvt_cyrusdb(8) utility may be used to convert between formats. It’s usage with quotalegacy is a special case, in that the first argument (“<old db>”) will be the path to the base of the quotalegacy directory structure, not to a particular file.

For example, given this typical layout:

/var/lib/imap/
|            /quota/
|                  /A/
|                    /user/
|                         /bob/

The proper cvt_cyrusdb command would be:

cvt_cyrusdb /var/lib/imap/quota quotalegacy /var/lib/imap/quotas.db twoskip

Back to Administrator Guide