DELIVERQUOTA(8)

💌 DELIVERQUOTA(8) — bestie edition

okay so like, the manual name is deliverquota, it lives in section 8 of the manual, and the author credit on the tin says S. Varshavchik. buckle up, this one's a banger 💖

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✨ NAME ✨

deliverquota — deliver to a maildir with a quota

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so deliverquota delivers mail to a maildir, but while respecting whatever software-imposed quota is sitting on that maildir. and like, this whole manually-enforced quota situation is the one described over in the maildirquota(7)[1] and maildirmake(1)[2] manual pages. iykyk 🫶

here's the move: instead of telling your mail server to drop the message straight into a maildir, you set it up so your mail server runs the deliverquota program to do the delivering, and you hand it the location of the maildir as the argument. that's it, that's the whole vibe ✨

the second argument to deliverquota is optional. if you do pass it, quota sets a new quota setting for this maildir. specifying quota is literally equivalent to running maildirmake(1)[2] with the -q option. and ngl bestie, that second argument is considered obsolete and might get removed in the future 👀

deliverquota reads the message from standard input and delivers it to maildir. and the tea is: maildir can point directly at a maildir folder, not just the main maildir — as long as that folder was created by the maildirmake(1)[2] command. periodt 💅

• -c — automatically creates the maildir, plus all the missing parent subdirectories (basically mkdir -p behavior). > ⚠️ babes, this option should be used with caution. like, genuinely.
• -w N — places 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. the warning message gets copied from the file specified by the -W option — or from /etc/quotawarnmsg if -W wasn't given. the "Date:" and "Message-Id:" headers are added to the message. and this warning is repeated every 24 hours (at least!), until the maildir drops below N percent full. 🔁😭

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🔥 RETURN CODE 🔥

deliverquota delivers the message to the maildir and terminates with exit code 0 if the message can be delivered without going over quota. slay ✅

but if the maildir is over its specified quota, things split depending on your flavor:

• the maildrop version of deliverquota terminates with exit code 77 (EX_NOPERM).
• the Courier version of deliverquota terminates 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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and that's the whole page bestie, no notes 🎀 this was Courier Mail Server, dated 01/10/2026, and the page itself is DELIVERQUOTA(8). go off, deliver those messages responsibly 💖✨🦋