Re: [Sheflug] mailbox format

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Alex Hudson uttered these words of wisdom:
> On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 21:12, Gareth wrote:
> > I read somewhere (I think it was a Postfix list) that /var/spool/mail is
> > old fashioned, and outdated.
> 
> A matter of spin. "Tried and tested".
> 

A matter of taste. Qmail users are used to $HOME deliveries, as that's the 
recommended solution for it, and it's one I've grown to prefer over time - 
can have a smaller /var (or one less disk partition), or more room for logs - 
either way, /var gains - even lazy admins can't get their logs DOS'd :)

> > When ever I get Outlook or even SquirrelMail to check my mail, it creates
> > stuff, folders and files in my home directory. I don't mind this, but dont
> > see why I need both, in my home directory and in /var/spool/mail.
> 
> You need both because they perform different functions. Your mail spool
> is mail which has not yet been delivered to you. The stuff in your home
> directory is things you have received and archived. 


I've got a qmail/imap/squirrel arrangement set up on a hosted server, using 
UW-IMAP. Incoming mail gets dropped into $HOME/Mailbox, then IMAP does all 
it's stuff in $HOME/Mail. Essentially $HOME/Mailbox (and hence /var/spool/
mail/$USER on other systems) is the IMAP folder INBOX.

If Garath's IMAP is chucking stuff straight into $HOME, rather than $HOME/
Mail, and that isn't desired, he'll need to look at either rebuilding IMAP,
reconfiguring IMAP, or changing the IMAP daemon.

 
> > the server is.... imap-2001a-15. found this url in the rpm details
> > http://www.washington.edu/imap/. not much help though.
> 
> UW IMAP - not sure how good that is. I think I've heard bad things about
> it; others could elaborate.
> 

It's fine. It's meant to be the reference implementation of IMAP, and it's 
been bug free for a while. Apart from maintenance, no other development work 
is carried out on it - it doesn't need it; does the job it was meant to do. 
That website is quite good as well; the FAQ's rather comprehensive, so I'm 
not sure why it wasn't much help exactly ?

However, I'm now looking at BincIMAP, and converting things to Maildir, but 
that's going to take me a while to evaluate as I'll then need to find/patch/
install a Maildir-aware pine as well (but that's getting off the issue). 
The primary reason I'm looking at the change is I have one user that keeps 
getting large mailboxes. A single file mailbox becomes unwieldy after a 
certain point, especially if all you want to do is scan headers and there's 
a 20MB attachment sitting in one message, so splitting the box down is the
best way to go.

I did have to tell UW though at build time that the incoming mail spool was 
in $HOME, so unless Gareth is going to rebuild his imapd, or check to see 
if his RPMs support the spool being in $HOME, he'll need a different 
server, or keep the mail spool in /var/spool/mail - UW has no supported 
configuration file with which this can be tweaked (there is an unsupported 
one where you might be able to do it, but the docs say "use it at your 
peril" as it's for experimental tweaking, and anything in it is subject to 
change at the blink of an eye).

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: Clannad - 04. The Hunter
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
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