Re: [SAGE] SMTP/POP/IMAP mail server redundancy

[Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com>]

Trey Harris wrote:
> In a message dated 27 Aug 2002, Mark McCullough writes:
> 
>>(Though some have suggested using high performance NFS to a NetApp so
>>every front end box is writing to the same mail spool instead of using a
>>proper back end.)
> 
> 
> Yikes!  The state of the art in NFS locking may be further along than it
> was the last time I looked at doing something similar on a high-volume
> mail server, but I'd be very, very afraid.
> 
> When you're doing mail, you live and die by the locking on the final
> mailspool destination.  Put you mailspool on a network filesystem, and
> your ability to do locking either becomes dicey at best, or it becomes
> slow, or both.  Neither situation is good for high-volume mail (though I'd
> rather have slow than corrupted mail.)

In this regard I would choose to use Sendmail + maildrop + Courrier Mail 
Server, which supports "maildirs" that avoid the whole need to lock a 
mail box file, by instead creating individual files per message.  The 
author of Courier Mail Server has done some analysis of "maildir" vs 
"mail files":

	http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/


-- 
Anthony C Howe                            +33 6 11 89 73 78
http://www.snert.com/     ICQ: 7116561      AIM: Sir Wumpus
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