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Mail.inf.ed.ac.uk Disk Usage

As mentioned in the good practices guide, large mailboxes on mail.inf.ed.ac.uk are the main cause for reduced performance of the mail server. They not only affect the owner of the large mailbox, but also other users, as the disks try to satisfy the read/write requests for the large mailboxes.

The good practices guide covers what you can do to reduce the size of mailboxes, but to actually see how much space you are using you should send an email to quota@inf. You don't need to include a subject or body for the message, it will try and figure out who you are from the From: field. If you are sending the mail from another account, then you can specify your username in the Subject: eg.

  Subject: quota neilb

The mail service will then mail the results back to the username specified (so you can't snoop on other peoples' disk usage!). The results will look something like:

Neil Brown <neilb@inf.ed.uk> requested your current disk quota
usage on the Informatics Mail server.

Quotas are not currently enabled on mail.inf.ed.ac.uk. For
reporting purposes, we'll assume a quota of 300MB, which was
the default quota prior to quotas being turned off.

Current quota usage is: 396349 KB (132.12%)
Current quota limit is: 300000 KB

You are running low on disk quota for your mail.
You should archive or delete some messages to make space.

Your mail folder sizes are:

AFS                                                     568.12 KB
AIAI                                                    288.05 KB
dice                                                      7.21 KB
dir2/                                                    16.00 KB
dir2/bar/                                                 6.00 KB
dir2/bar/baz                                              2.00 KB
dir2/bleh/                                                4.00 KB
dir2/foo                                                  2.00 KB
docs                                                      4.25 KB
dotfiles                                                 90.41 KB
sent-mail                                              1589.79 KB
...

The things to look for are large "Sent", "Trash" and "Spam" folders, as they are usually the easiest to prune.