On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 08:58 -0600, Cliff Hayes wrote:
I think that mbox puts all mail in one file and maildir puts each individual mail in its own file in a separate directory for each user. But the mail_location parameter is confusing to me. Like when it was suggested that I add "mbox:/var/empty:" ... to me that's like saying "we don't use mbox ... so the mbox is the bit bucket" ... which is obviously not how it works. To me "mbox:/var/spool/mail/u%" made more sense but was not recommended. That's just one example.
Well, the way mail_location works is:
<mailbox format>:<mail root directory>[:<options>]
So you begin with "mbox:", and the next one must be a directory containing all non-INBOX mailboxes. But you were using POP3 so you didn't have anything except INBOX. But you still needed a directory, so /var/empty was one possibility. Perhaps /dev/null would have worked too. /var/spool/mail/%u anyway was mbox file, not a directory, and that would have just failed.
I think this is confusing only if you're thinking POP3-only access..