[EMAIL PROTECTED] says:
> Well, you should run the POP client (for me, thats MH's inc command)
> from a machine on the "main" end of the slow link, not from your home
> site.
>
> But that's the same as having the delivery agent put it directly in your
> inbox. The only difference is that you have to kick it off manually instead
> of having it happen automatically.
Remember that in some sense you can say that the mail ALWAYS
ultimately ends up in the user's directory. There is, however, good
reason to have the user kick off the act of moving the mail instead of
having this "difference" of having the mail system do it.
That difference is dramatic. Its all the difference in the world. One
way, operating via POP, permits mail to be run by fairly conventional
Sendmails and the like that need no special privs (and which can, in
fact, be easily modified to run without privs thus closing dramatic
numbers of security holes) and which does not require dramatic
centralization of mail handling. Running via POP also has dozens of
side advantages like permitting transparent use of the mail system by
users on non-AFS platforms like random PC's running windows.
The other method requires extensive hacking and yields, IMHO mediocre
results, especially with respect to reliability, load, and security.
I can name dozens of reasons to run pop instead of having a single
/var/spool/mail or even dropping the mail in users boxes. The former
is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the latter is full of problems,
too. As one example, what happens when the user's server goes down? Do
they stop getting mail or does your radically hacked sendmail just
hang? Or does it requeue?
Especially when you try to run high reliability environments, its nice
to have single points of failure cause as little disruption as
possible. To me, POP works very nicely in this sort of world -- it
scales perfectly, its easy to secure, its easy to manage, etc. Random
hacks with Sendmail and AFS make me far less happy overall and they
don't seem to have any obvious benefits other than making users
operating AFS over slow lines from their home not need to run a single
program to load their mail on the main campus network before trying to
read it.
Perry
