Mail Spool Partitions
*********************

A mail spool is divided in partitions. Partitions can give you the
opportunity to tier your storage, and/or use multiple filesystems to
apply restrictions to information (contained within mailboxes), such
as the absolute maximum quantity of storage used.

See also:

  * Storage Considerations

  * Mailbox Distribution


Storage Tiering with Partitions
===============================

As an example, one could imagine a set of disks configured as follows:

* Some small but fast (expensive) disks for the main storage array,

* Some large but slow (cheap) disks for archives.

Note: This particular example is more efficaciously achieved via the
  new (post 3.0) Archiving feature.

Mounting a filesystem on the fast disks under
"/var/spool/cyrus/fast/", and mounting a filesystem on the slow disks
under "/var/spool/cyrus/slow/", you could configure the following in
imapd.conf(5):

   defaultpartition: fast
   partition-fast: /var/spool/cyrus/fast/
   partition-slow: /var/spool/cyrus/slow/

Next, you could set the quota on "user/john@example.org" to a measly 1
gigabyte:

   $ **cyradm -u localhost**
   verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
   IMAP Password:
   localhost> **sq user/john@example.org 1048576**

You could then also give *John* a mailbox "Archive" for him to clean
up his Personal Namespace without loosing access to his existing mail:

   $ **cyradm -u localhost**
   verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
   IMAP Password:
   localhost> **cm user/john/Archive@example.org slow**
   localhost> **sq user/john/Archive@example.org none**

*John* now has unlimited storage in his "Archive" folder on the cheap
slow disks, while his day-to-day email is on the expensive fast disks.


Restricting Storage Used with Partitions
========================================

Important: It is not recommended to use partitions for the purposes
  of restricting the amount of storage used by (sets of) mailboxes,
  unless you can also grow the filesystem (preferably online) and you
  have (automated) means to determine what is to end up on each
  partition.

If a customer "example.org" purchases 5 GB of storage, and
"example.com" purchases 500 GB of storage, then two partitions sized 5
GB and 500 GB respectively could be used to restrict the users of each
customers without individually restricting each user (to a percentage
of the total storage).

Warning: Monitoring the storage used is critical, because actually
  running out of disk space is very costly – and not a problem the
  customer themselves could recover from.

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