thunderbird disable disk quota

[105547111]

There is some bug in thunderbird, if you run quota

There is not enough disk space to download new messages. Try deleting old mail, emptying the Trash folder, and compacting your mail folders, and then try again.

If you then run:

quotaoff -vau

Mail downloads fine. You then can run quotaon -vau

I dont have quotas set just use it to monitor use by users.

There must be a way to tell thunderbird not to use quota. Its annoying that root has to disable quota so a user can download their mail when 1TB is free space, stupid!

[smr54]

One issue that I've run into is that Thunderbird now, by default, will store a copy of imap mail on the hard drive. You have to be sure to change this--it's one reason you might be running into disk space issues.

Insert rant here about how thunderbird is getting worse with each release, adding bloat and making it harder to manually configure.

As for quota, isn't that usually set on the server, rather than the client?

[jpollard]

Quotas are for any location that runs multiple users.

Not just "servers". There is no difference between a workstation and a server.

Next, if you home directory is from a file server with quotas, I would expect the same problem.

[105547111]

It's nothing on the server, it's purely on my desktop. Both fedora desktops do this on two accounts using pop3.

Somehow thunderbird sees quota running and brings up the popup error. If I switch off quota and check, I can turn quota back on, even during download and it's okay.

It's checking right at the point of verifying login details that passes right when it's about to download.

There must be an advanced setting to stop it in thunderbird.

[george_toolan]

There are probably better ways to monitor disk usage ;-)

What happens if you set a very large quota for the user?

[105547111]

There is no quota set, I am simply using quota to total files and space used per user. The user is free to fill their /home.

It's obviously a bug introduced but my hope seems to be in the advanced settings in thunderbird. I only found this solution of turning off quota to download on Ubuntu forums as they have the same issue.

[jpollard]

I suspect its a bug.

A quota value of 0 has always been interpreted as "unlimited".

I bet thunderbird is checking quotas so that it will not corrupt files by having a partial write go bad, and interprets 0 as 0 allowed.

[105547111]

I searched for quota in the advanced settings I found about 5 references, but these had values in them. Could not find a plain quota that referenced a 1 or 0.

Could you point me to the advanced key name? I can try setting to 1

It's just really annoying. It's happened on the last and this release of thunderbird, so I am not holding my breath for a fix.

Thanks!

[jpollard]

If it is anywhere, it would be buried in the I/O routines of the code, not a configurable item.

[105547111]

Yes as I have not seen it there. Oh well it's script time to get around this

[george_toolan]

It seems a bit silly to enable quotas and then not set a limit ;-)

So why don't you use a large number instead of zero?

This would fix the problem, wouldn't it?

[jpollard]

I've seen it done several times. In my case, management only wanted to know who was using the most storage, not prevent them from using it.

Giving everybody the maximum limit of the filesystem would have also worked. The tools supporting the quotas would allow setting each users limit to what they were currently using... and setting them with the maximum would require each to be modified singly.

Not too much of a problem with one to ten users... but we had 800 (it was a mail server - they only wanted to know who got the most/kept the most before imposing limits).

For small groups with shared disks, just tracking the total usage would be enough. It is one way to justify getting more, and much faster than having to create a sum for each user. And if you are in a hurry because somebody forgot to delete a scratch file...