PMDF System Manager's Guide

The exquota, noexquota, and holdexquota keywords control the handling of messages addressed to VMS MAIL mailbox users (OpenVMS), Berkeley mailbox users (UNIX), and PMDF popstore or PMDF MessageStore users (all platforms) who have exceeded their disk quotas.

exquota tells PMDF to ignore user quota limits and deliver messages even when users are over quota (except on the UNIX l channel, where exquota is equivalent to holdexquota; either keyword results in holding messages for over quota users). In particular, on OpenVMS for the l channel, PMDF uses the EXQUOTA privilege when exquota is used to perform the delivery to over quota users. noexquota tells PMDF to return messages addressed to over quota users to the message's sender. holdexquota tells PMDF to hold messages to over quota users; such messages will remain in the PMDF queue until they can either be delivered or they time out and are returned to their sender by the message return job. The default is exquota (which on UNIX for the l channel is equivalent to holdexquota). Use of the default is strongly recommended; bouncing mail on the basis of quota is usually not a good idea.

On OpenVMS, besides the l, msgstore, and popstore channels, these keywords technically also affect the other channels that deliver via VMS MAIL: the d channel and any mail_ channels. However, the keywords are typically not useful on d or mail_ channels since such channels typically connect to a remote transport agent of some kind and enabled privileges are not transferred.