[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Paul Blackburn]

Hi Jason,

POP, IMAP, and "STMP" (I guess you meant SMTP) are all protocols
for handling email across a network.

However, if your email has been delivered to $HOME/.mail/mbox
and $HOME is in /afs then why do you need to use a network protocol
to access your mailbox?

Most Mail User Agents (eg mutt, mh, elm, netscape/mozilla mail)
can be configured to read right out of a mailbox file rather than
connecting to a POP, IMAP etc server. That's how I have accessed my email.

I have not used pine but in my experience, I have not seen any problems
of mail being lost with elm or netscape mail and a mailbox in /afs.

I confess, I don't understand why you have seen pine "clobber" a mailbox.
It does not sound like good MUA behaviour to me.
--
cheers
paul                            http://acm.org/~mpb

Jason Edgecombe wrote:

>hi all,
>
> I work at a university and all email on the afs system is put into
>~/.mail/mbox
>
>  this has pro's and con's. one advantage is that users can't augment
>their quota by emailing things to themselves.
>
>  one disadvantage that I've seen is that you CANNOT access the mail
>spool directly.  POP, IMAP and the STMP delivery machine need to be on
>the same machine. If they are not, then you might lose email. I have
>observed this with people using pine to access the mail spool directly.
>pine checks for new mail, then exits. new mail arrives between the time
>pine checks and exits. result: pine clobbers your mail spool and your
>new mail disappears.
>
>  this is why I say if you want to put the mail spool in people's home
>dir's, all access to the mail spool needs to be done on ONE machine.
>Somehow I don't think that this scales well.
>
>Jason Edgecombe
>
>Enesha Fairluck wrote:
>
>>Method 2: deliver into AFS
>>   Advantages:
>>
>>      + Scales better than first method.
>>      + Delivers to user's $HOME in AFS giving location independence.
>>      + Probably more secure than first method.
>>      + User responsible for space used by mail.
>>
>>   Disadvantages:
>>
>>      - More complicated to set up.
>>      - Need to correctly set ACLs down to $HOME/Mail for every user.
>>      - Probably need to store postman's password in a file so that
>>        the mail delivery daemon can klog after boot time.
>>        This may be OK if the daemon runs on a relatively secure host.
>>
>>Seems to recommend NOT using a dedicated mail machine, but putting into
>>$home/mail or someplace, and indicates that the dedicated mail server
>>doesn't scale very well.
>>
>_______________________________________________
>OpenAFS-info mailing list
>OpenAFS-info@openafs.org
>https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
>