> I know that various places deliver incoming email into AFS
> volumes. I am interested in hearing how various sites have implemented
> this and if they have any docs/white-papers about it. We are looking into
> doing this and need to make it scales, etc and have an idea of potential
> problems we will encounter.
We considered that here, but gave up on it because there were just too
many problems and "what-ifs".
It is possible to do with maildir-style delivery, but delivering into a
standard Berkeley-style mailbox is a recipe for disaster. The most
caustic problem involved users over quota; the mailbox would be opened,
a write would be attempted, and suddenly the mailbox would have a
length of 0.
What we've ended up doing is using an NFS-RAID on the mail servers as
a drop for the mail spools, then hacking the local delivery agent
(procmail) to return a modified passwd structure with a new home
directory (i.e. /usr/local/users/username).
If you still want to try, the right way is to hack the delivery agent
so that it has a token, but will not allow a user to write or read from
another user's mailbox. I don't think you want to try messing with the
MTA (users shouldn't be delivering to a file from their .forward files
or anything anyway).
Chris
