Since april 1st XS4ALL pro­vides 500MB mail­box­es for clients who al­low their mail to be spam-fil­tered. I don't have a lot of dum­my friends who mail me out­ra­geous­ly large mails, so that is not even re­mote­ly in­ter­est­ing. But in the sit­u­a­tion be­fore I had my mail han­dled by proc­mail, which would make my mail end up in a fold­er in my home di­rec­to­ry, and that would eat into my 50MB web­space. And re­cent­ly I had been work­ing at a bolt­ed down of­fice which didn't al­low SSH traf­fic so I couldn't read my mail with mutt on the shell serv­er, and I found out my proc­mail set­up made the web­mail ser­vice a bit use­less.

So I made XS4ALL fil­ter spam out of my mail, and don't both­er to send it to some spam­box. This al­lows my pri­ma­ry ac­count to grow to 500MB. But it can't grow if it stays emp­ty be­cause proc­mail moves every­thing to my home dir. The so­lu­tion is to find out there is a fold­er some­where on /var/spool/mail/ with my name on it, that now al­lows up to 500MB of my data. To this space I moved my mail­box­es which were pre­vi­ous­ly in my home­dir, and in my home­dir I made sym­bol­ic links named "mail" and "Mail" to that mail­box­tree. And then with a lit­tle con­fig­u­ra­tion in web­mail it's all set to man­age up to 500MB of mail in mutt or with web­mail. The only things not very per­fect is the in­box is not the web­mail in­box, and Fold­er in­ter­nal mails show up in mutt.

I only do this be­cause I don't ex­pect im­por­tant mails on this set­up. Don't try this at home if you rely on your ac­count. This is not very well test­ed, and it can break when BOFH does some­thing that's not this weird...