[Dovecot] Temporary files

[Arne K. Haaje]

Den 14.07.2010 22:34, skrev Timo Sirainen:
> In v1.0 .. v1.1 deliver was writing incoming>128k mail to /tmp file (to
> avoid reading it all into memory). In v1.2 I moved it to user's home
> directory. This slowed deliveries for NFS users. Also people with
> filesystem quota had trouble since now user required twice as much
> available quota to save a message. The FS quota problem was "solved" by
> having quota-fs plugin change the default temp file path to /tmp.
>
> So why was the move made in the first place? Because a) some people had
> small (maybe ramfs) /tmp and Dovecot was eating it all up and b) to
> avoid any potential security issues with storing per-user files to a
> shared directory.
>
> I'm now thinking about a new setting (mail_temp_dir?) for v2.0 where
> these temp files would be stored (lda, lmtp, some others in future).
> Maybe the b) problem isn't that huge, so maybe there doesn't need to be
> a way to store them to user's home. So that leaves a) problem. Maybe the
> setting could default to /var/tmp instead of /tmp? That probably has
> more disk space available usually. (I hope /var/tmp is available
> everywhere?)
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>    

I'd like to have /tmp as a default, but a variable to set it if the need 
is there. Much like default /tmp on MySQL works a long time, until you 
need to ALTER TABLE on that 30 GB table ;)

Arne