We run a fairly traditional UNIX email service: delivery to a Solaris-8 machine with sendmail, hosting the "/var/mail" mailstore. The operations on the mailstore files themselves are entirely from the Washington suite: POP/IMAP server (clients) and their "tmail" (sendmail 'Mlocal' delivery). There is no direct NFS access to the mailstore.
One of the pieces of received wisdom is that the "/var/mail" mailstore should not be accessed by NFS, as NFS is (they would say) notoriously problematical. I'm inclined to believe this.
Nevertheless, we are toying with the idea of putting "/var/mail" onto a NetApp thereby, of course, introducing NFS and its locking into the equation. Naturally, we are rather wary of doing this. But, if done, its major advantage for us would be in allowing us to set up an expandable "farm" of modest-size IMAP/POP machines, rather than having to run it all on one major machine.
Anyone got any thoughts and/or experiences with UNIX /var/mail on NetApp?