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Re: New imap saves all mail to $HOME/mbox ????



On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, George Bonser wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Alexander Stavitsky wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Tim Sailer wrote:
> > 
> > > > I use fetchmail and I do not think I upgraded it recently, although I
> > > > might be wrong. This happens even if I telnet to port 143 and just check
> > > > how many messages I have. Besides, imap server still counts those in mbox
> > > > as messages. It looks like it concatenates mbox and /var/spool/mail/$USER
> > > > when showing user's INBOX. That's why I think it's impa problem, not
> > > > client problem.
> > > 
> > > Nutscrape takes a look at every file/directory in your home dir and
> > > treats it
> > > as a mailbox.. :(
> > 
> > I do not think I mentioned Netscape anywhere in my email and that's
> > because I DO NOT USE it for email. I'm saying that even if I just telnet
> > to port 143 and issue SELECT INBOX it shows not only messages in
> > /var/spool/mail/$USER but also in $HOME/mbox, appending those in
> > /var/spool/mail/$USER to those in $HOME/mbox.
> > 
> 
> This has been the default behavior of many imapd programs for a long time.
> It moves the mail from the spool to the inbox upon checking for mail. I
> do not think this is considered a problem but is possibly a configuration
> item when building that particular imapd implimentation.

>From the README file:

   There are other make options, described in imap-4/src/osdep/Makefile.  A
common additional option is to enable the mbox driver, which will move mail
from /usr/spool/mail into a file called mbox in the user's home directory.
This is done by specifying the EXTRADRIVERS variable, as in:
        make a32 EXTRADRIVERS=mbox

> 
> In cases like this, the assumption is that the home directory is a remote
> mount most likely using some form of automounter. The mail is moved to the
> home directory so that it can be accessed from any machine. The mail spool
> on the mail server might not be accessable from any other machines.
> 
> Since your mailbox lives in your home dir it makes sense to move the mail
> to the mailbox as soon as you check your mail.  This makes perfect sense
> when you have a network of several hundred unix machines in a building
> and the spool file is not accessable from your local machine but your
> home directory is.
> 
> 
> George Bonser
> 
> If I had a catchy quip, it would be here.
> 
> http://www.debian.org
> Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.
> 
> 
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-- 
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