On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 09:24:16AM -0700, Dan Stromberg wrote:
On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 02:37, Faisal wrote:
Is it a good idea to have the mbox file in user home directories rather then /var/mail/ ?
We have many users who like to leave all their mail in /var/mail for ages. It's a problem, because some software understandably hates large mbox files.
[Having already responded, this lets me make take both sides...]
I can recall one positive thing about having inbox in /var/mail in the past. In cases where the inbox is unrestrained by filesystem quotas (e.g. if there are no filesystem quotas or if the local delivery agent runs setuid root), you can do some special things. One thing we did here was to have the LDA look up the user's inbox quota, and if the new message would be the one to put the mailbox over the limit, the LDA would first insert a special notice that said something like "the next message puts you over quota; all further messages will be [bounced/deferred] until you get back under quota." If the mailbox was already over quota, it would (bounce/defer) the new message.
You can't really do that if the LDA runs as the end user and is constrained by quotas. You also can't do it if the LDA is responsible for autofiling incoming messages into different folders. Since we do the latter here, the most consistent thing is to have the inbox in the home directory.
mm