Re: Handling Over Quota Bounces

[Keith McDermott <keithmcd@purdue.edu>]

At Purdue we have both Zimbra and Exchange, depending on your role in 
the University.

Both systems will fail instantly if over quota and bounce a message 
back.  We used to retry messages for three days in Zimbra, but we 
changed that a few years ago to have both systems have the same behavior.

The only time we change that is if we are moving users from one mailbox 
server to another - then we will increase the retry time temporarily for 
those specific nodes.

-Keith

Keith McDermott
Messaging Systems Administrator
ITIS, ITaP
Purdue University

E-mail: keithmcd@purdue.edu
Address:155 S. Grant Street
        West Lafayette, IN 47907
        
"The road to wisdom, well, it's plain and simple to express,
 Err and err and err again, but less and less and less."
 - Piet Hein

On 8/26/14 11:47, Matt Mencel wrote:

We have almost 10,000 messages in our deferred queues on our Zimbra MTAs.  Out of those only ten are deferred for any reason other than "over quota".  So nearly 100% of our deferred queue is "over quota" deferrals.

The current default behavior on an over quota message is to defer and retry the mail for 5 days and then let the sender know their recipient was over quota.  I see I can eliminate this default behavior and bounce "over quota" emails immediately with this...

zmprov gacf zimbraLmtpPermanentFailureWhenOverQuota

Five days is a long time for a sender to think their message was delivered when it actually was not.  They never know until they get the bounce on the 5th day.  I think the conventional wisdom these days is to fail fast....so if there is a problem the sender should know immediately.  And of course a lot of it just junk marketing, mailing lists, and bouncing bounces, etc...

It seems we have a lot of accounts that go over quota during the summer because the customer doesn't check their email regularly, part of the problem of being an EDU.

How are other schools handling this?  What seems to be standard practice?

Thanks,

Matt Mencel

Western Illinois University