More control over mail quotas for accounts...

[gkgcpanel]

I would like to see more granular control over mail spool quotas.

Either set up a maximum quota at the package level (so a lower priced plan has 50MB mail spools and a higher price plan has 100MB mail spools) and not allow users to modify this.

Or

A way to allow users to change the mail spool up to a certain limit. Example might be: 5 accounts max, and 100MB total for the account, and either one email account can use all 100MB or 2 accounts can use 50 each or one at 60 and one at 40 etc... Or all 5 accounts can use 20MB each...

Right now, customers can change their quota to anything they like (even unlimited) which is not ideal.

[cPanelDavidG]

I would like to see more granular control over mail spool quotas.

For the sake of clarity, can you define what you mean by "mail spool quota?"

Currently, when mail quota is used in the context of a cPanel&WHM environment, it refers to the total amount of incoming email that is capable of being stored within an entire mail account.

Right now, customers can change their quota to anything they like (even unlimited) which is not ideal.

To clarify, these quotas are all subject to the overall disk quota of the cPanel account. Setting an email quota to unlimited doesn't let that email account have unlimited storage unless you also gave them an account with unlimited disk quota (and even then you're subject to the limitations of the partition that account's home directory resides upon).

[gkgcpanel]

For the sake of clarity, can you define what you mean by "mail spool quota?"

Currently, when mail quota is used in the context of a cPanel&WHM environment, it refers to the total amount of incoming email that is capable of being stored within an entire mail account.



To clarify, these quotas are all subject to the overall disk quota of the cPanel account. Setting an email quota to unlimited doesn't let that email account have unlimited storage unless you also gave them an account with unlimited disk quota (and even then you're subject to the limitations of the partition that account's home directory resides upon).

David, yes that is the correct terminology.

Here's our situation, we have 4 different hosting packages available ranging in features and pricing. The lowest priced package is limited to 10MB of quota space in their mail spool. The next package is limited to 50MB, the next is at 100MB etc..

We have modified themes to lock all packages to their respective quotas without allowing customers to adjust.
If someone is paying for a low end package, and wants more mail spool available (other than 10MB) we want them to pay for an upgraded package.

Also, back in 2008 or 2009, there was a bug that allowed users to change their mail quota to unlimited, and they were able to store several gigs of mail, it was not adhering to the disk quota limit we had set up. Hence why we had to create our own themes and modify a few template files.

Thanks

[monarobase]

If I understand correctly you want to be able to set maximum e-mail quotas per account and per package ?

If you were to do this then wouldn't you also want to separately limit the web space ? I think there is already a request for this. Although I can understand the utility of this, we just offer total space for web and e-mail as it does not make any difference to us what percentage is e-mail and what percentage is for the website.

[cPanelDavidG]

David, yes that is the correct terminology.

Here's our situation, we have 4 different hosting packages available ranging in features and pricing. The lowest priced package is limited to 10MB of quota space in their mail spool. The next package is limited to 50MB, the next is at 100MB etc..

We have modified themes to lock all packages to their respective quotas without allowing customers to adjust.
If someone is paying for a low end package, and wants more mail spool available (other than 10MB) we want them to pay for an upgraded package.

Okay, I still don't know what it is you are calling a "mail spool" or "mail spool quota" - but it seems you want to limit what a cPanel account owner can enter for the email quota of their individual quotas. Is that an accurate interpretation of what you are asking for?

Also, back in 2008 or 2009, there was a bug that allowed users to change their mail quota to unlimited, and they were able to store several gigs of mail, it was not adhering to the disk quota limit we had set up. Hence why we had to create our own themes and modify a few template files.

Thanks

Odd, we rely on the OS to enforce disk quotas - and those files are owned by the system (cPanel) user. So since we don't have our own quota system (and IIRC, we never have), not sure what could have happened there.

[monarobase]

This is how I understand mail spool :

A spool is a temporary storage space, in e-mail terms this is generally the space where outgoing e-mail is stored until it is delivered or deleted and also is sometimes used for incoming e-mail before it is delivered to the e-mail account.

But I don't think this is what you mean by it.

[gkgcpanel]

Mail Quota (or Mail Spool Quota) is the amount of disk space an email account has for storing email...

cPanel by default (had) it set so users could set up mail boxes with a default of 250MB each (or they could set it to anything else including Unlimited). Initially, we assumed that if they set it to unlimited, that it would NOT go past the disk space alotted for the hosting. But that was wrong, because our lowest package comes with 5GB of storage space, and up to 500 email accounts, and we had users who had 20 email accounts all set to Unlimited and each account had 3 to 7GB of space used up. How that happened is unknown. This problem was apparently corrected within the last 3 years or so, but we still had users storing emails up to 5GB (using their entire quota space). While that would seem like it's not a big deal, think about the fact that nightly backups backup all email each night, think about a shared hosting server where 50 accounts all do this, and your disk space for the entire server runs out very quickly...

We ended up modifying the themes and templates to hard code the mail quota to what we wanted to do, and this has worked great. But each time we update to the latest cPanel version, we have to take the current x3 theme and copy it to our custom themes and make those template changes again. I have since written a Perl script that handles all that for me and makes it much easier. But it's still a pain, and I thought, it would be better if we could either (or perhaps both) have a way of setting the desired quota we want at the package level... So for example if the lowest package we offer comes with 5GB of disk space (for the website) and 500 email accounts, each of those email accounts would be limited to 10MB of quota space (for email). The users would NOT be able to change that. If they wanted more mail quota space, then they would need to upgrade to the next package we have, which might give them 50MB of mail quota space.

Or, alternatively, we would like to be able to say "lowest package" has 5GB of disk space, with unlimited email accounts and 1GB of mail spool quota divided by the number of accounts set up. Example here would be: 1 email account. It could have 1GB of space for mail, but then no more accounts could be set up, or 2 email accounts with 500MB of disk space each or 4 accounts with 250MB each etc...

Would either of these 2 (or better yet both) of these options be doable?

Thanks,
Peter

[cPanelDavidG]

Would either of these 2 (or better yet both) of these options be doable?

Anyone have any ideas on how this could be doable?

Polling for disk space is a severe drain on disk I/O and CPU, which is why we rely on functionality built into the kernel to handle this more efficiently. Also, we do not customize the kernel at this time. This means relying on existing kernel-provided functionality and I'm not aware of this being possible in CentOS, CloudLinux or RHEL.

I see this request come up every so often so I'd like to see this happen, but if we do it - it must be done in a practical way that isn't resource-intensive (or as developers say, "expensive").

[gkgcpanel]

Anyone have any ideas on how this could be doable?

Polling for disk space is a severe drain on disk I/O and CPU, which is why we rely on functionality built into the kernel to handle this more efficiently. Also, we do not customize the kernel at this time. This means relying on existing kernel-provided functionality and I'm not aware of this being possible in CentOS, CloudLinux or RHEL.

I see this request come up every so often so I'd like to see this happen, but if we do it - it must be done in a practical way that isn't resource-intensive (or as developers say, "expensive").

Errr.. The first option (hard coding the Templates) works just fine for us. It doesn't have to be any resource intensive and to my knowledge doesn't require any kernel hacking/updates to the quota system.

All you are doing is adding a feature to the Package settings (similar to how you have the Disk Space Quota) that says something like: "Mail Spool Quota" and a setting in there, 10MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB etc... Then you modify the templates to pull whatever that value is.

The other method (checking for allowed mail quota, and adjusting the number of email accounts accordingly) is a little more difficult and I can see that causing a resource issue.

[LDHosting]

Didn't there used to be an option to disable unlimited email quotas? Was that option removed for some reason?

http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/improv...ty-162373.html

[cPanelDavidG]

Didn't there used to be an option to disable unlimited email quotas? Was that option removed for some reason?

http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/improv...ty-162373.html

Those tweak settings govern default values, not accepted values.

[LDHosting]

Those tweak settings govern default values, not accepted values.

Hmm.. not according to Don's post: http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/improv...tml#post680237

Quota options for new email accounts [?] This controls which quota options a user can choose when creating a new email account.

Both default
Unlimited
User-defined

The last 2 of the tweak settings mentioned in that post still exist (the default value settings), but not the one above.

Here's another Feature request that is even titled "Disable unlimited Mail Quota's".

http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/disabl...as-141517.html

You closed the thread stating that the feature is now available in all tiers and referenced the above Tweak Setting option, which no longer exists

I actually remember the functionality being there, but looking at Tweak settings now, the above option has vanished, leaving only the "default quota" options.

[LDHosting]

Any idea guys? If not, can http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/disabl...as-141517.html be unlocked again/refiled with the devs as the feature no longer exists?

[cPanelDavidG]

Any idea guys? If not, can http://forums.cpanel.net/f334/disabl...as-141517.html be unlocked again/refiled with the devs as the feature no longer exists?

Sure, done .

I dug into this, turns out this feature was removed in a later release of 11.28.

[LDHosting]

Cheers, David.

Any idea why it was removed? Also, at the time of writing this, the thread is still locked