[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Jason Edgecombe]

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.