Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 09:14:49 +1100 (EST) From: Andrew Reilly <reilly@zeta.org.au> To: tomdean@ix.netcom.com Cc: masg@gauss.logicnet.com.mx, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail Message-ID: <199802022214.JAA24841@gurney.reilly.home> In-Reply-To: <199802021808.KAA02141@ix.netcom.com>
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On 2 Feb, Thomas Dean wrote: > Use 'mail'. Look at 'man mail'. > This is true, but not necessarily all that helpful if what you want is to get Netscape mail working. I have a question about mail myself, that I am reminded of: a) FreeBSD mail/sendmail is configured to use flock mail file locking, with the /var/spool/mail directory permissions set so that dot-locking is not allowed (no "other" write permission on /var/mail). This is fine and good, and is the BSD way to do it, but: b) flock doesn't work across NFS, I believe. I've heard something about the rpc.lockd protocol being unimplementable. (Impossible to avoid race conditions?) The obvioius BSD answer to this is "don't do that". Run an imap4 or pop service on the mail host instead, and have your MUA talk to that. Certainly Netscape can be made to do that (talk to a POP server). What do we do about MUAs like Netscape that come as binaries for other platforms (Linux, for example), and want to do dot-locking? Do we have to build and run a POP server just to talk to our local mail spool? Now that there is a native FreeBSD version of Netscape, it presumably _does_ use flock mail file locking, so the problem is moot. It does, doesn't it? If that is the case, then the answer to the original question is probably "use the most recent FreeBSD version, from the ports collection". No? -- Andrew "The steady state of disks is full." -- Ken Thompson
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