| Stephen Gran on Sat, 14 Dec 2002 14:00:07 -0500 |
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On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 07:18:51PM -0500, Jeff Abrahamson said: > I'm moving my workstation to a place that's not my mail server. So how > do I read mail? > > Here mail is my mail machine, smarthost, and ws is my > workstation. Some thoughts: > > 1. mail (the machine) sends my mail on to my workstation. ws knows to > deliver locally if it can, but otherwise to use mail as a > smarthost. (Is this too complicated? What happens to mail when ws > is down for something? It can happen with ws.) > > 2. mail delivers locally. ws mounts mail:/var/mail. Uh, oh. Procmail > needs my home directory. Things get bad. > > 3. mail delivers locally, ws mounts mail:/var/mail, and mail mounts > ws:/home/jeff. Oy, this sounds like a recipe for a hang if I so > much as unplug a cable. And I've had mutt complain about linux's > nfs's ability to lock properly. > > 4. ws mounts mail:/home/jeff/Mail. I ssh to mail to read > mail. Procmail is fine. Because ws has mounted > mail:/home/jeff/Mail, I can save attachments and still have access > to them, etc. Seems dirty, but so does everything else. > > 5. ws runs fetchmail, no nfs mounts, but lots of pops or imaps. > > These all seem a bit on the kludge side. Suggestions? Here's what I do, but YMMV. mail runs fetchmail to pick up user mail at different accounts, and is also the MX for the domain. mail also runs an IMAP and POP server (courier in this case, but there are plenty). All mail is stored here until picked up elsewhere. My workstation runs fetchmail, and picks up user mail from mail. Each user on ws can then set up .forward or .procmail files as they like to control sorting. Exim on the workstation uses mail as a smarthost, with authentication. This way the only box that has to stay running is mail - if workstation gets turned off overnight or something, email just sits in the spool on mail. If I'm away from home, I can ssh to workstation and read my mail sorted normally, or if workstation is off, I can ssh (or POP, IMAP, webmail) to mail, and read it unsorted. One of these days, I'll get around to sorting my email on mail, and then set up fetchmail to get it from the various IMAP folders, but for now this works OK. HTH, -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | PL/I -- "the fatal disease" -- belongs | | steve@lobefin.net | more to the problem set than to the | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | solution set. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, | | | SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attachment:
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