Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 01:45:53 +0200 (MET DST) From: "Mikael Karpberg" <karpen@sea.campus.luth.se> To: security@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD's /var/mail permissions Message-ID: <199606092345.BAA08788@sea.campus.luth.se> In-Reply-To: <4393.834221631@palmer.demon.co.uk> from "Gary Palmer" at Jun 8, 96 09:13:51 am
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> > Does this mean we should give up on using mail? > > No, it means you should give up on using NFS mounting of /var/mail (or > /var/spool/mail, or wherever else your local OS sticks it). NFS is an > abombination at the best of times, and NFS locking even more so. THere > are far more elegant solutions to the problem of distributing mail to > client workstations, namely IMAP and POP. Sure, it means that people > who use /usr/bin/mail to read their e-mail will be stumped, but I > think that the pro's of using this form of mail distribution far > outweigh the cons. Works fine if you have your own workstation and a program to fetch the files over POP and put on your local machine. However, you could do that with sendmail setup or a .forward file on the server too. The problem is when you don't have your own workstation, but instead a computer lab, where you want to be able to read mail from any of the clients and don't have any storage locally on the workstations. Then you have to NFS mount /var/mail/ to be able to read the same mail on all the machines. if NFS can't handle it, you have a problem. True... But not a problem with /var/mail, but with NFS implementation that needs to be fixed, in that case, I think. > (The fact that my favourite mailer, MH supports POP, SPOP, etc, has > nothing to do with it :-) Elm does not. :P And although it sucks bigtime, it still beats having to use pine, MH, netscape, or something like that, until I manage to find time to write a mailer myself. /Mikael
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