Re: UNIX mail defaults

[Danny Sauer <danny@dannysauer.com>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 12:14:21PM -0800, Robert Threet wrote:
> I am wondering whether mail is kept forever after
> reading it or if it has (or can have) a specified
> time-to-live.  Is this a Sendmail, UNIX or Pine issue?

I'm replying off the list because this is a little old now - but I thought that
I'd let you know about teh alternative to mbox format (which is where mail is
kept sequentially in a flat file) called maildir.  Postfix, exim, and qmail
(as well as others) work nicely with maildir, which keeps each message as a
seperate file in a directory.  It's good because you don't have the file
locking issues that come up when someone's reading/deleting mail from their
mailspool file and the delivery agent wants to add new mail to that file, plus
it works a lot nicer over NFS.  It's bad because it takes longer to get a list
of all the messages in the spool if that process involves listing a whole lot
of files instead of just reading one big file.  It's also kinda bad because
most unix mail access programs support mbox, not nearly as many support maildir.

Anywho, using maildir, oen could just use a find command to delete messages
older than a certain date based on the ctime of the file, which would be a lot
easier than parsing the darned spool file.  Using postfix, one can configure
their mail server with a sane config file instead of that monstrosity that
is sendmail.cf.  www.postfix.org - it's faster than sendmail as well.

--Danny, rambling randomly again
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