qmail - "User over quota" problem

[mmclean]

I've been running qmail now for over 5 months now and have recently startied encountering what appears to be a random problem.

Every now a then when a user receives an email a bounce message is sent back to the sender indicating that the user is over quota, and thus giving the sender the impression that the message did not get through. However, this is not the case, as the message still gets through, every time.

There is also no quota set on the amount of hard drive space a user may use. In fact this problem is affecting users with disk usages between 20MB and 140MB, but not everyone is being affected.

After doing a little research I found a couple of similar posts. One of them indicated that the Maildir directory was not created properly. However, in my case the folders were created correctly and had been working for a couple of months before this problem started. One suggested solution was that there needs to be a .qmail file in every user's directory, but this problem is affecting both those with and without the .qmail files. Technically, if a .qmail file isn't present, the default is used instead.

Another person had a similar problem, but eventually said that he had fixed it and that the problem was due to a config problem, but failed to mention what the fix was.

Does someone know what causes this "User over quota" problem. It is really starting to get annoying, espescially to those outside that keep getting the bounce messages.

Thanks

[adaptr]

First, your assumption that an over quota message gives the user the impression that the mail will not be delivered is subjective; it does not, in fact, say that, and indeed it doesn't mean that at all.
Read the qmail docs to see what it does mean; the observed behaviour is absolutely correct.
The RFCs specifically state that no error message may cause mail to be lost unless there is absolutely no alternative, like a full disk.

So the warning message will be sent, but it is entirely up to the user to take action - or not.

And secondly, qmail mailquotas are separate from diskspace quotas - one is not the same as the other.

It's all in the manual, I think.
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>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

[mmclean]

I have already had look through quite a lot of the qmail documentation trying to solve this problem, but have still not found out why this error message is being generated when there are no quotas, and therefore, no reason to issue such a message, unless there is a default value specified somewhere that I have not yet been able to find.

What I'd like to know is why it only recently started to exhibit this behaviour, and also how to fix it.

[mmclean]

Does anyone have an idea?