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Subject: Re: FreeBSD's /var/mail permissions
To: security@FreeBSD.org
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 01:45:53 +0200 (MET DST)
From: "Mikael Karpberg" <karpen@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