On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Bruce Shaw wrote:
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.
However, there is no reason why you should need to do this; to refererence
your own mailbox, you should always use the name INBOX.
Sendmail does not support that AFAIK.
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.
