Speaking of all this mail stuff, I have just had an evil plan, and am curious if it's been implemented before..
Has anyone actually implemented a distributed email system based on NNTP? Not like the simple email to nntp gateways, but something far more featureful. This would work as follows: Every system that you would like to have full email access from has a local NNTP server. All these systems are hooked up using mostly standard NNTP configurations and protocols. Only relatively minor modifications would be need to support authentication and the other features. Your domain(s) are configured to use all of these (net-reachable) systems as MX hosts. And each mailbox/mailspool is setup as a separate 'newsgroup', allowing for hierarchial mailboxes. Presumably your top level hierarchies are local usernames, and the server only allows authenticated users access to their 'mailbox'(hierarchy). Group mailboxes would be easy to implement though. Something like this: bb.inbox bb.inbox.lists.slug bb.sent-mail bb.sent-mail.lists.slug [..] public.somegroup.inbox etc Whenever a mail comes into one of the MX hosts, it is filtered out, using procmail or something, and dropped into the appropriate newsgroup. Alternatively have only the primary MX handle this, but then you cannot get any new mail if this box is unreachable. The magic of NNTP then comes into play, distributing that email across all of the hosts in the NNTP group. You then read your email using any nntp capable client. To delete messages, your client sends a usenet 'cancel' type message to the local server, and this gets distributed around the network. Sending an email sends via normal SMTP protocols, and optionally puts a message out via NNTP to update the sent-messages groups. This is incredibly useful especially with intermittently connected hosts like laptops. You can read/send/delete messages there, and when it gets put on line again, it will send the cancel messages, sent-messages and other things via the NNTP net to all other hosts, ensuring a consistent system across all hosts. What would be the limitations/weaknesses/etc that would make this a bad idea? I can see a new Free Software project about to spawn :) -- Ben Buxton - Random Network Person -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
