[Dovecot] Temporary files

[Timo Sirainen]

On 14.7.2010, at 22.02, Steven King wrote:

>> 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 haven't seen anywhere that /tmp is actually a ramfs, but that is
> besides your point. I would say that if people are using Dovecot they
> should be designing the partitions around the need for the software and
> services they are running (at least that is what I do).

But there are tons of people who just use defaults, at least until they run into problems, so the default needs to be a good one. In this case I'd even say probably over 99% of Dovecot users won't change the default, and most of them not even aware of the existence of this setting..

> Everywhere I have seen /var/tmp used, it has been linked to /tmp.

I don't see that in any systems I have access to right now.. FHS says /var/tmp is for temporary files that must not be removed when rebooting a machine. So if /tmp is a ramfs, /var/tmp is almost guaranteed not to be.

> I
> would recommend using /tmp as the default. Also, not all distributions,
> including Slackware (which a lot of slack users like Dovecot) do use
> /var/tmp for anything, which can get confusing.

But /var/tmp exists, right?