[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Leif Johansson]

Paul Blackburn wrote:

> 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.
>
There is also a problem with quotas -- I believe that if, while 
appending to your
mbox, you exceed your quota, AFS might truncate the file to 0. The 
solution to
this and other problems I use is maildir. I deliver mail to maildir 
mailfolders in
 $HOME in afs and run multiple courier imap/pop/webbmail servers to provide
both local and protocol access. This seems to work well enough.

I use maildrop from sendmail for delivery, which also gets me a very 
nice pre-
processing language for presort/spam filtering. The maildelivery boxes 
have ip-
acls which allow them to write to $HOME/Maildir. Currently the same boxes
run imap and pop (only over ssl!) but that could be split. There is a 
lot of flexibility
with this setup and it seems to scale well.

            MVH leifj