Subject: RCPT and user's mailbox quota exceeded question

From: David Mayne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 17:37:00 -0400 (EDT)

My apologies if this has been covered before - I searched the
archives and read the 452 vs 552 response codes on RCPT threads,
but neither the current draft or these messages appear to 
answer this question.

   452 Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage
   552 Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation

According to smtpupd-10, 452 and 552 codes are used to indicate
that the server has had enough recipients. Given that the
452 and 552 codes are defined as above, what is the appropriate
response code for the server to return on RCPT when the user's 
mailbox is over quota, and we (at least on a temporary basis) 
don't want to accept the message for this user ?

Randall Gellens touched on this in archive message 3350 in
the thread  Re: From the chair: 552 vs. 452, where he stated:

>Since 552 is defined as "exceedes storage allocation", and is used if the
>size of the message is greater than the user's disk quota, I think we
>should just clarify that too many recipients is 452 and leave 552 as disk
>quota exceeded.  Otherwise the client might keep resending a message that
>it should just bounce.

Was any agreement ever reached on what is the appropriate 
reponse code to return for mailbox quota violations on RCPT ?

Thanks,

David
[email-masked]

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 05 Jun 1999 15:22:37 -0700

David Mayne <[email-masked]> writes:

> My apologies if this has been covered before - I searched the archives
> and read the 452 vs 552 response codes on RCPT threads, but neither the
> current draft or these messages appear to answer this question.

> According to smtpupd-10, 452 and 552 codes are used to indicate that the
> server has had enough recipients. Given that the 452 and 552 codes are
> defined as above, what is the appropriate response code for the server
> to return on RCPT when the user's mailbox is over quota, and we (at
> least on a temporary basis) don't want to accept the message for this
> user ?

452 is a problem that, if you try again later, may be fixed.  552 is a
problem that isn't ever going to be fixed unless the incoming message
changes.  So I'd say that 452 would be appropriate if the user is
temporarily over quota and 552 is appropriate if the message is larger
than the user's entire quota.

"In the wild," so to speak, I routinely see 552 bounces for temporary
over-quota conditions, though.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 1999 23:42:52 -0400

> over-quota conditions, though.

Another interpretation of those two statements is to regard the
distinction between "system storage" and "storage allocation" as being
important. With this in mind, these two can be interpreted as:

  You're out of disk space, bud!

  Your mailbox is limited to 10 megabytes and the messages there plus
the new one put you over the limit, even though there's lots of disk
space.

I was reviewing this recently for another reason, and the above is the
interpretation I wound up giving to these two statements. If my
interpretation is wrong, I definitely want to know. 

I like your interpretation  and would love to be able to return 452 when
the user has reached their personal limit. But my reading doesn't allow
it.

I think a clarification is needed.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]