Quota Question ...

[ubumail]

Hi,

How does the quota part of Zimbra work !?

What I mean is, if I set the quota of an account to 250mb does the server hold 250mb for that user to fill up, or does it just monitor the account until it hits 250mb and then start bouncing messages !?

For example, lets say I have 1000mb for mail storage, can I create 1000 accounts and set each accounts quota to 250mb or can I only create 4 accounts with 250mb quota because 250mb x 4 = 1000mb !?

Thanks

Mic

[mmike]

I think that ZIMBRA just monitor the account until reaching the limit!

But wait confirmation from ZIMBRA team.

@+

Mike

[KevinH]

We only check the user limit. If you give out more quote than you have disk space you may run into problems. So not a very good idea. Of course we do have an option to gzip messages and also only store one copy of each message so you do get some savings but it's still better to ensure you have enough disk space and just increase the quota for those who need more.

[gkra]

Originally Posted by KevinH

We only check the user limit. If you give out more quote than you have disk space you may run into problems. So not a very good idea. Of course we do have an option to gzip messages and also only store one copy of each message so you do get some savings but it's still better to ensure you have enough disk space and just increase the quota for those who need more.

Wait, the single-message-instance storage is an option? I thought it was an on-by-default feature. If it's an option, where do I turn it on?

[ArcaneMagus]

It is on by default. If you have ever rsynced your store directory and watched the log you will occasionally see "messages" in some users that are just symlinks to other real messages.
And yes if you really wanted to you could give out 100K accounts on just that 1GB of storage but it really is best to make sure that you have enough quota to sustain all your users.

[jasper]

How does zimbra calculate the space used by a user?
It appears that the mails are stored here:
/zimbra/store dir, with a userid as subdir under it.

Is it that the dir space usage is calculated say for user by:
du -kh /zimbra/store/21

browsing throught the source code is not helping much :-(

Please advice.

[Rich Graves]

Repeating the previous question:

"How does zimbra calculate the space used by a user?"

Our in-house Zimbra trainer says he just saw his quota usage jump from 50% to 90%. The usual "search -t message larger:20mb" isn't illuminating.

I have a SAN snapshot immediately after upgrading to 5.0.15. As of that time, zmmailbox said:

mailbox: user@example.edu, size: 2.47 GB, messages: 77147, unread: 8666

Today, the same 5.0.15 version of zmmailbox says:

mailbox: user@example.edu, size: 4.66 GB, messages: 92905, unread: 8745

It is possible that a 20% increase in message count led to a 89% increase in byte count, but I find this hard to believe, especially given that we don't see large attachments. He's deleted all messages found by "search -t message 'larger:10mb'", including Trash and Junk, and still we have the unexpectedly large bytecount.

Is there a way to recalculate?

I can't be sure (can I?), but I don't think we've had other sudden jumps in quota... just this one user.

[ArcaneMagus]

Your average message size would only have to be 145 KB to get that kind of difference:

((4.66 GB) - (2.47 GB)) / (92 905 - 77 147) = 145.727976 kilobytes

So it may not be entierly unreasonable if he gets a lot of mail with even something like a company logo that isn't compressed very well.

[Rich Graves]

In this case, the quota calculation was correct, but the user did not receive 15,000 new messages in a month. The culprit was Outlook+ZCO+McAfee.

McAfee correctly detected a 170K message dated March 2002 as a trojan.

McAfee told Outlook to move that message to the /Quarantine folder.

The copy to /Quarantine succeeded.

The removal appears to have failed.

Repeat 14,602 times. :-(

ZCS 5.0.15; Outlook 2007 (no SP2); ZimbraConnectorForOutlook/5.0.2990.16.

What doesn't make sense is why the message originally dated March 14, 2002 and moved to /Quarantine on May 27, 2009 got a Zimbra Received date of June 18, 2007.

mbox user@example.edu> gf -v /Quarantine
{
     "children": [],
     "color": "defaultColor",
     "grants": [],
     "id": "44397",
     "messageCount": 14602,
     "name": "Quarantine",
     "parentId": "1",
     "path": "/Quarantine",
     "unreadCount": 0,
     "view": "conversation"
}
mbox user@example.edu> search -t message in:Quarantine
num: 25, more: true

        Id  Type   From                  Subject                                             Date
    ------  ----   --------------------  --------------------------------------------------  --------------
 1. 174861  mess   D                     Julie- is this a virus?  - Thanks, Doug             06/18/07 17:39
 2. 174860  mess   D                     Julie- is this a virus?  - Thanks, Doug             06/18/07 17:39
 3. 174859  mess   D                     Julie- is this a virus?  - Thanks, Doug             06/18/07 17:39
 4. 174858  mess   D                     Julie- is this a virus?  - Thanks, Doug             06/18/07 17:39

2009-05-27 09:33:37,201 INFO  [btpool0-34690] [name=user@example.edu;mid=57;ip=137.22.2.218;ua=ZimbraConnectorForOutlook/5.0.2990.16;] mailop - Adding Message: id=160462, MessageID=<05d601c9ded8$1d83d110$588b7330$@edu>, parentId=-1, folderId=44397, folderName=Quarantine.

[ArcaneMagus]

Not sure about the discrepancy between the "original" date and the Zimbra received date, but from what I have seen a lot of the machines that are compromised enough to be sending out spam have horribly out of date clocks, so a 2002 date is entirely possible.