Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!mills
From: mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary Mills)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Delivery to home directories
Message-ID: <1991Apr24.210106.5287@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: 24 Apr 91 21:01:06 GMT
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Lines: 17

Recently, I enquired if it would be reasonable to apply disk quota to
the mail spool to discourage users from keeping huge mailboxes there.
The consensus was that it wasn't a good idea.  One novel suggestion I
received was a cron command that moved huge mailboxes to the user's home
directories and notified them how to access mail there.

So, thought I, why not just modify /bin/mail to deliver all mail to files
in the home directories?  Has anyone already done this?  Would there be
a problem with this scheme?  Some home directories would be NFS-mounted,
as opposed to the mail spool, which is a local disk.  What locking scheme
does /bin/mail use?  I haven't seen this documented.  We have numerous
mail user agents, such as ``Mail'', ``elm'', and ``mush''.  Do they all
use the same locking?

We run SunOS 4.1.1, with NFS, NIS, and DNS, if it matters.
-- 
-Gary Mills-         -Networking Group-          -U of M Computer Services-