[Kolab-devel] (fwd) how to deal with quotas / suggested feature "monthly quota increase"

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) wrote:

> In my experience, there's no difference between a user hitting their quota and 
> a user hitting their quota. The user can have its quota increased (possibly, 
> there's additional cost?) or clean up its mailbox -like, most of the time it's 
> the Trash/Junk folder filling up, haha ;-)

In my experience, it's usually people accumulating email over time.  A lot
of people argue that they need to store their historic email so that they
can go back and look at it.  Our company, if anything, agrees.  If they do
go through and delete some stuff, they then hit the quota again some time
later but this time cleaning up is probably not possible.

> Having said that, maybe I'm misunderstanding your workload. If so, please 
> enlighten me!

I guess the most important question what does one try to achieve in using
quotas.  I daresay it will depend on the organisation but it's probably one
of:

1. To enforce an absolute limit on users' disk usage regardless of
   circumstances such as how long they are in the organisation.
2. To keep people aware that while they may accumulate email over time,
   there are limits and they should delete mail which is not important.
3. No real purpose.

Obviously if [3], you don't set quotas.  

If [1], you may be making life very difficult for your users.  A hard quota
like that might as well be saying "you can store mail for the past X years,
and then you must delete anything older than that" (assuming they receive a
constant flow of email).  If you compromise on [1] and start upping
individual quotas, you quite quickly end up trying to do [2] or in reality
doing [3].

We would like [2].  We don't want a situation where everyone will come to
us at intervals asking for an increase.  We would prefer to tell people
that by keeping within a reasonable budget each month, they need never go
over quota.  That should hopefully keep our work-load down in increasing
quotas but keep their attention on their accumulating disk usage.  It's
also more reasonable for them as they can see a budget to keep within,
rather than an absolute figure they will inevitably exhaust.  We can also
project how our disk usage will change in the future by aggregating
everyone's increase rates.

In an ideal world, most people stay within their monthly budget and never
need a quota increase.  Where people exceed quota, a decision can be made
by a manager to say that this person's rate of accumulation is acceptable
and increase the quota rate to match or say to the user that it's not
acceptable and to start sticking with their monthly quota.

I hope I've been clearer this time, sorry :-)

Gavin