hi

we are running centos, with squirrelmail and dovecot.

- home folders (which includes sent, drafts, trash) are on /
- inboxes are on /var

/ had run low on space recently, and this caused squirrelmail to be really slow, as well act strangely i.e. it would send mail, but would not copy the message into the sent folder.

we've had a look at the httpd, messages and mail logs, to determine which users may have sent messages without getting saved to their sent items (to warn the users).. however there were no messages to indicate such. other events such as message delivery had got recorded.

has anyone got any ideas why there wouldn't be such error/informational messages?

thanks.

It would be unusual to not have any sort of warning in a log. what application are you using for your MTA? Is there a mail.log or mail.error file? Another place to look would be in syslog, which gets copied on a lot of items.

Unless the space was completely used.
How low that space was? If the hard drive get completely used than any write operation (to hard drive) could fail (logging too).
The failed process of copying mails into the sent folder can confirm this.

Sending of mail to someone else actually don't require any local space (I think). So it can be (possibly) successful with no hdd space.

I didn't find any internal logs in my own squirrel mail installation so the only place where you can find logs are httpd log. But there is a possibility that squirrelmail didn't expect this scenario at all. (And you won't find exact logs about it)

I think the only solution is to find out when was all the sent mailboxes last modified successfully and after this date notify the users about it. You can also use the maillog as a reference about the sent mails after this date. (its only an idea)

Sorry about not replying yesterday.

Noway2 - have already looked in /var/log/maillog. Will investigate the syslog bit.
hua - I think at one point it was probably at 0. However, I managed to free up about 400MB, but it was still not behaving properly. Your idea of looking at the maillog to find the sent times may be a potential solution (which would have to be cross checked with individual users)

Thanks both!