DELIVERQUOTA(8)

💌 NAME 💌

deliverquota — drop mail into a maildir, but make it respect a quota, bestie 💖

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

deliverquota [-c] [-w percent] [-W filename] {maildir} {quota}

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so deliverquota delivers mail into a maildir, and it actually cares about whatever software-imposed quota is sitting on that maildir. this whole hand-rolled quota sitch is explained over in maildirquota(7) [1] and maildirmake(1) [2], so go read those if you want the lore 🧚

instead of telling your mail server to yeet the message straight into a maildir, you set your mail server up to run the deliverquota program to do the delivery — and you hand it the location of the maildir as the argument. slay ✨

the second argument, quota, is optional. if you do pass it, quota sets a brand new quota setting for this maildir. passing quota is literally the same thing as running maildirmake(1) [2] with the -q option 👑 that said, the second argument is considered obsolete and might get removed in the future, so… don't get too attached 💀

deliverquota reads the message from standard input and delivers it to maildir. and get this — maildir can point directly at a <highlight>maildir folder</highlight>, not just the main maildir (as long as that folder was created by the maildirmake(1) [2] command). iykyk 🦋

the -c option auto-creates the maildir and every missing parent subdirectory (think mkdir -p energy 💅).

⚠️ bestie, use -c with caution. for real, fr fr.

the -w N option drops a warning message into the maildir if the maildir has a quota setting, and after the message was successfully delivered the maildir was at least N percent full. that warning message gets copied from the file you name with the -W option — or from /etc/courier/quotawarnmsg if you didn't specify -W. the "Date:" and "Message-Id:" headers get added onto the message too 📬 and the warning keeps repeating every 24 hours (at least) until the maildir drops below N percent full. not it being persistent 😭

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🫶 RETURN CODE 🫶

so here's the vibe check: deliverquota delivers the message to the maildir and bounces out with exit code 0 if the message can be delivered without going over quota. ate. ✨

if the maildir is over its specified quota, tho? 💀

• the maildrop version of deliverquota exits with exit code 77 (EX_NOPERM)
• the Courier version of deliverquota exits with exit code 75 (EX_TEMPFAIL)

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

maildirquota(7) [1], maildirmake(1) [2].

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Sam Varshavchik Author

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🌸 NOTES 🌸

1. maildirquota(7) http://www.courier-mta.org/maildirquota.html
2. maildirmake(1) http://www.courier-mta.org/maildirmake.html

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mwah 💋 that's the whole page — brought to you by the Courier Mail Server, dated 01/10/2026, and this is DELIVERQUOTA(8) signing off, periodt 🎀✨