[ILUG] mbox on network filesystem

[Peter McEvoy]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 01:37:26PM +0100, Gareth Eason wrote:
> > I'm in the middle of a fairly large migration of servers, and a
> > situation has arose where I need to give several seperate systems access
> > to mbox mailboxes.
> > Does anyone have any experience of serving mboxes from a network
> > filesystem? Even with the mail on a normal ext3 partition, I do
> [snip]
> 
> 	Yes. Skynet.ie used this technique for a while, with variable results,
> tending towards the poor end of the spectrum.
> 
> 	If you must share mailboxes, I suggest either using maildir, which is a
> solution I've tested and know it works (Skynet.ie are migrating towards
> it gradually now) or alternatively, allowing only one IMAP/IMAPS server
> access to the mail spools, with everything else chained off that. This
> means that the imapd can handle the locking issues.

Thanks for the reply.
I will move to maildir whenever it is feasible, at the minute it's not.
I do offer imap access as well, but my users are slow on the uptake, and
the real reason I cant use imap to solve all my problems is openwebmail
- I still have hundreds of people using it (it seemed like a good idea 3
years ago..) and despite offering them pretty front ends like
roundcube/squirrelmail/etc to replace it, I'm still going to have to
cater for those who for various reasons wont switch.

If the network fs idea is a non starter (and I suspected from the start
it would be) then it looks like I'm going to have to keep 2 copies of
the mail for the time being.

Thanks again.

-- 
Pete