+--- In a previous state of mind, Jim Davis jdavis@CS.Arizona.EDU wrote: | | On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Gordon Keegan wrote: | | > 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.
Don't rely on the locking to work correctly for critical apps like mail. You will get bitten in the most horrible of ways when you least expect it.
| 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.
It is still not an atomic operation, so you are still exposed.
The trick is to get away from the mailbox format. Use the maildir format (ala qmail). Each mesg has a unique ID (no locking needed for delivery) and it makes enforcing mail quotas (age of mesg) much simpler.
If you use procmail as your delivery agent and you are not keen on dropping sendmail in favor of qmail, there are some patches and recipies for procmail that do the maildir delivery. You will need a new pop and imap daemon (look to qmail for these) that understands the maildir format.
The other beauty of using the maildir format (esp if your users mail around large items like word or excel docs) is that the POP daemon does not have to lock and copy the monolithic mbox for each user when he/she pop's their email. This will reduce the IO on your mail server quite a bit.
Alexei