[Dovecot] "virgin" mail accounts

[Christian Balzer]

David (DHS) wrote:

>On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Christian Balzer wrote:
>
>> Subject: [Dovecot] "virgin" mail accounts
>
>[ ... ]
>
>> It died not very graceful in either case, esp. the later.
>> 
>> Unless there are very RFC'ish and imperative reasons, I'd suggest
>> that dovecot creates all missing bits if possible no matter what the
>> storage method or pretends to have encountered an empty mbox file or
>> maildir cur/new respectively. 
>> 
>> The rationale should be obvious, no frantic user calls about "My mail is
>> not working" when the answer is "Duh, that's because you never ever 
>> received one yet". ;)
>
>Whilst I agree with you, I try, in such circumstances, to arrange for the
>account creation system to send a "welcome" email so that there is already
>a message waiting for the user when they first log in :)  I can then rely
>on Exim to do all the hard work of creating the INBOX properly AND the
>user gets a nice warm fuzzy feeling of having something there when they
>first log in to play... :)
>
Oh yes. Same here, same supreme MTA. ;)
Alas due to the various DB layers an account has to filter thru to actually
become visible to the mail system an immediate welcome mail is not possible
in our case so there is a quite happily and heavily hit window of 
opportunity for users to jump to false conclusions unfortunately.

Another nice thing about "pretending to have an empty mailbox if I can't
get to the bloody thing" is that it allows migrations or maintenances w/o
users noticing (too) much. Though I guess I should nag the perdition 
author about that, our old, self written pop proxy did that when it 
couldn't reach the respective backend mailbox server.

Regards,

Christian Balzer
-- 
Christian Balzer        Network/Systems Engineer                NOC
chibi at gol.com   	Global OnLine Japan/Fusion Network Services
http://www.gol.com/