Could you not use ProcMail for local delivery (dot locking)?
No..im not a NetApp engineer, but in past lives that's what Ive done before when presented with mailspools via NFS.
-----Original Message----- From: Nick Christenson [mailto:npc@sendmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 1:06 PM Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: File locking, sendmail and toasters
Just for reference, I was lead author of that paper.
Running mail over NFS is doable if you're really, really careful. You will definitely want to replace the rpc.lockd locking mechanism with something better. This means modifying every program anyone uses to touch the mailbox (have to do that if you go with maildir as well).
If I understand your system and requirements, which is in doubt, I don't think this is a solution I would recommend for your situation.
Hope this helps.
In a general sense with general NFS implementations, that's not enough by itself to be sure you're safe. You certainly want to use file locking rather than lockd, but using files isn't a sufficient condition to be sure that your mail won't get messed up.
Note, though, that you can "get away" with doing a naive NFS based mail implementation and statistically never see problems, but there is usually a race condition in there somewhere.