[Dovecot] What about saving your INBOX at ~/mbox ?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hauke Fath" <hf at spg.tu-darmstadt.de>
To: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel at merl.com>
Cc: <dovecot at dovecot.org>
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 11:37 AM
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] What about saving your INBOX at ~/mbox ?


> Am 21.05.2004 um 8:30 Uhr -0400 schrieb Nico Kadel-Garcia:
> >There is one feature of the old WashU imapd that I miss, though. That
> >daemonn could be configured to automatically transfer the user's email
> >to the "~/mbox" upon activation of the daemon, effectively reducing
> >the size of the /var/spool/mail/{username}" mail spool and helping
> >keep the user's disk usage in their home directories, not in
> >/var/spool/mail. This can be a good thing for various reasons.
> >
> >But I don't see any way to enable that behavior for dovecot. Is there
> >something I'm missing, or do folks feel it would be reasonable to add?
>
> By chance, I have just set that up.  :)

[ Configuration to alter delivery of mail to ~/{arbitrary-location}
deleted. ]

Your approach is not unreasonable. It does require modifying sendmail,
rather than putting the behavior in the IMAP daemon where the WashU daemon
did it. It also pretty automatically does it for *ALL* users, which is a bad
idea for cases when the user's home directory is NFS mounted and may be
unavailable at a particular time.

The WashU imapd also didn't do this transfer unless the ~/mbox file already
existed. It seems to me that, in such circumstances and if I wanted to do it
before the IMAP daemon was active, I'd use a procmail recipe to deliver it
to the user's mbox. But in that case, if the file transfer fails for
whatever reason, the messages would be left behind in /var/spool/mail/%u.
And if I'm using user's ~/.procmailrc's, I have all sorts of weirdness for
any potentially NFS mounted home directories.