Okay, so back in the day, system mailboxes all lived in
/var/mail/whomever. Locking these things was an issue, /var was real
small on my BSD system, and on top of everything it meant having to
maintain two sets of quotas.
So then, I modified my delivery agent (procmail in this case) to deliver
to ~/.mail.
This worked well for all things, quotas were respected and it was a
standard unix-format mailbox, which pine, elm, and even mail(1)
understood as long as your environment and your pine.conf was set right.
Now, as I become more familiar with IMAP and whatnot, I'm beginning to be
of the realization that apparently your mail spool is only supposed to be
a "take things out on first sight" type of thing, which should be done
automatically by imapd if you have a special file called INBOX.
(http://www.faisal.com/docs/mbx.html)
This breaks any familiarity I would have with things like using procmail
to deliver to ten different folders (since after all, what would be the
difference, they're *all* inbound folders that will be delivered to).
I've been a pine whore for years, but it's been my understanding that pine
should also work that way in theory -- but for me it's not. When I move
things out of my .mail folder, they're "off the radar". Given, this is my
personal flow of work, but since pine only showed one folder at a time, I
wanted to be able to work within a reasonable timeframe (say, three
months) all without having to wait for pine to chunka-chunka-chunka
another folder open.
So, based on the above, is what I've been doing all these years "Wrong" by
the usual standards?
Is there a best-practices concept?
I ask all this in possible preparation for switching to a new mail format.
Most of my users are pop3 and imap types, and a lot of them complain about
the slow speed of squirrelmail (which seems to not work nicely with imapd
anyway (for which there are a multitude of alleged symptoms ranging from
the sorting to the locking to the format --
http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/SpeedWithUW)
-Dan
--
"there is no loyalty in the business, so we stay away from things that piss people
off"
-The Boss, November 12, 2002
--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM
Site: http://www.gushi.org
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