On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Gordon Keegan wrote:
While we're on the subject of mail, I was thinking of moving our sendmail spool area from a drive local to the Sun mail server to one of our NetApp boxes. Anyone have any pros/cons regarding NFS mounting the mail spool to the mail server?
Locking has to be absolutely, positively bombproof or you can lose mail. Not just individual messages but whole mailboxes. Users tend to get disgruntled when that happens.
If you're using the stock Sun sendmail setup then you probably have mail.local as your local delivery agent; procmail is allegedly more robust (if you use dot locking) but I'd still be a bit leery.
If what you're looking for is to let clients mount the spool partition (as well as the mail server) so users can sit at different machines and see the same mailbox, then you might consider running a POP or better yet IMAP daemon instead. With bundled POP (and almost working) IMAP support in the big two browsers these days then probably everyone has a POP or IMAP client on their desktop.
If you do have clients mount the spool too then remember many shells periodically check for new mail and if the spool server is down the shell mysteriously hangs at that point. Users tend to get disgruntled when that happens too.