OK, now I'm confused. Back awhile ago I was using a variant of cyrus-IMAP that required a specific file named "INBOX" to be sitting in your home directory.
Yes, you're confused, and I think that it's a good idea to resolve the confusion, because otherwise you may have substantial problems in the future.
Cyrus IMAP uses its own file structure (no home directories), so I don't think that you were using Cyrus (or if you were you've misunderstood what was going on).
I'm not using INBOX. I'm using /var/mail/whatever-the-user-name-is.When you give a specific filename, then a file by that name must exist.I'm relying upon sendmail to handle mail file creation. It has a mind of its own.
That's unimportant. See below.
Sendmail does not support that AFAIK.However, there is no reason why you should need to do this; to refererence your own mailbox, you should always use the name INBOX.
This is unimportant. INBOX is not a sendmail concept; it is an IMAP concept.
The IMAP server accepts the name INBOX from the IMAP client, and the IMAP server knows how to translate the concept of INBOX into whatever your mailer (e.g. sendmail uses). More importantly, IMAP knows that INBOX always exists (even if there is currently no corresponding file on the filesystem -- it treats that situation as an empty INBOX).
There is no need to reference the /var/mail/<username> file by that name from an IMAP client. Use INBOX in the IMAP client, and let the IMAP server do the magic that it does so well.
The whole point of INBOX is that the IMAP client does not ever need to know what sort of mailer you have; you may have sendmail, Exchange, or Bombastic Blurdybloop's Best Bit Basher. As far as the IMAP client is concerned, it's all INBOX.
Use of the name INBOX prevents this problem.Hence we were creating the /var/mail/whatever file and populating it with a dummy record. I suspect the nature of that dummy record may have changed from version 2000 to 2004.
In effect, you didn't understand the magic that was going on, and you used magic to try to get the right result. Unbeknownst to you, it was black magic.
There is one of those fortunate cases where you can solve the problem by doing less instead of more. Don't create files with those dummy records (just let the software do it), and don't try to use the /var/mail names; just use INBOX and let all the good magic work for you. :-)
Good luck. Please keep me informed on how it goes.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
