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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Sendmail and NFS
Message-ID: <1990Dec16.174928.2908@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 16 Dec 90 17:49:28 GMT
References: <1990Dec12.233139.6810@starnet.uucp> <4386@alliant.Alliant.COM> <1990Dec15.203420.25181@starnet.uucp>
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Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 52

In article <1990Dec15.203420.25181@starnet.uucp> mzellers@starnet.UUCP (Mark Zellers) writes:
>In article <4386@alliant.Alliant.COM> rdr@cl4.alliant.com (Roger Roles) writes:
>>
>I'll try your suggestion re: the OR flag.  If I don't have multiple
>machines writing into a single spool directory, is there another way I
>can acheive the same effect?  What I am trying to get is to have a
>heterogeneous network act (for mail purposes) as if it were a single
>machine.  Here are my objectives, in order of importance:
>
>	* Users should be able to send mail within the local network
>	without knowing which anything about which machine each user
>	lives on.  Alias files seem to solve this nicely.
>
>	* Notification:  Users should be informed as soon as possible
>	after mail arrives for them even if they are not logged into
>	their "home" machine.
>
>	* Distributed access: Users should be able to read their mail
>	from whatever machine they happen to be logged into, rather than
>	having to log into their "home" machine to read mail.
>
>	* Centralized administration:  Ideally, it should be possible to
>	add users from a single machine.
>
>It may be that Sendmail is not capable of providing the functionality I
>want in a heterogeneous environment.  Still, I want to get as much of
>this agenda implemented as possible.
>
 You are asking too much of sendmail to expect it to do all of this.

 Sendmail is basically a mail transfer program.  It transfers messages from
one machine to another.

 In the usual scheme of things (in a BSD setup for example), when mail arrives,
sendmail invokes a local delivery agent (usually /bin/mail).  The local
delivery agent actually stores the mail in the mail box.

 Notification is usually done either by the shell (which periodically checks
the date of your mailbox), or by something like biff.  Biff works because the
delivery agent (/bin/mail) sends it a message that mail has been received.

If you are satisfied with shell notification, you can export the mail spool
directory.  The user CAN read the mail from any machine where it is mounted.
If you worry about NFS updates, you can always export/mount as read-only.  That
would allow reading the mail, but not deleting it, on machines other than the
home machine.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940