Hi, I want to create a quota for my users' mailboxes. I have found plenty of articles and howtos on creating a quota for /home, but none on the /var/spool/mail directory. I have read that I have to modify the /etc/fstab file but I have no clue how.

This is my /etc/fstab file:

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0

I am running Fedora Core 6 with one hard drive. My mail transport agent is Sendmail.

I need to finish this as soon as possible or my boss will chop my head off! HELP...and please be as detailed as possible in your reply

It would be the same for /var as if you were setting it up for /home, using quota's within the kernel are on a partition by partition basis. Most set up quota's on /home since most users files reside there, apply the same to /var where their mail spool directory stores mail and you should be good.

What IMAP Server are you using? Courier IMAP and Cyrus IMAP both do IMAP quotas. File systems hard quotas will give you a lot of problems with your Email clients - they will lock. You need an Mailbox Server that has built in indexed quotas. I did a migration from Dovecot to Cyrus, for that and other reasons, which also provided excellent quota support. Let me know if you need help.

Can you tell me exactly how? Do I put this line in /etc/fstab?

LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults,ursquota 1 2

And do I put aquota.user in /var or /var/spool/mail?

I am using Dovecot

I just tried editing the fstab file. I rebooted but it wouldn't start up. I deleted the line and it worked...

And I'm not using IMAP, I'm using POP3

I created a quota for the / filesystem, but I only want it for the mail folder...

so... I guess nobody knows?

You will not be able to use mail quota's unless you install a mail delivery agent with built in IMAP quota; such as Courier, Qmail or Cyrus. Dovecot does not support IMAP quotas, they have not programmed it into the source code. I hope they will one day. Actually I've been waiting for them to do so for several years and that I one reason why I don't prefer Dovecot. Also it doesn't have message filtering.

The POP protocol does not have quota built in because it doesn't need it. POP is meant for the messages to be stored on the client and not the server so there's no need for quotas on POP.

Dovecot is very fast and very easy to setup for small mail delivery systems, but if you want a more robust system you'll need something else.

I have also installed sendmail with dovecot as pop server. I setup the quota on /var as all the mails are getting stored in /var/spool/mail/user. Just added 'usrquota' in /etc/fstab and checked that things are working fine.
What problems you are facing in setting quota in /var?

moenterprise is not able to create a quota for each individual mailbox. That is because they are using file system quotas and not IMAP quotas. File systems quota's don't work well with IMAP; it tends to crash the session when the file system quota is exceeded because IMAP does not know what to do. IMAP does not talk to the file system quota.