pine

[Aaron Howell]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 03:35:44PM +0000, igueths at attbi.com wrote:
> > Also, the default directory suggested by exim sources implies
> > /var/spool/exim but I changed that to /var/spool/mail for my purposes
> > when I built a binary package.
Be careful with this.
Exim's spool directory and your mail spool are two different beasts altogether.
Its not a particularly good idea (though it _should_ work) to have them in the same directory.
_definitely_ don't do that on a well loaded multi user system though.
Or you'll have yourself all sorts of locking problems.
BTW the latest fsstnd document specifies tat /var/mail is the cononical place for mail to be stored under Linux.
The intention of the spool partition is for transient files only, such as incoming/outgoing mail spools, uucp, usenet news etc.
The idea being that if you are using mirrored disks or the like for the rest of your system, you can safely enough get away with not doing that for the spool drive (which is good because on systems that handle e.g usenet spool drives can get really really big).
Depending on how critical mail passing through the system is, you might also choose not to back up /var/spool as well to save tape space,
but that's individual policy.
(and its assuming you _do_ keep your mail under /var/mail where it should be).
As for /usr/spool, thats a compatibility link for very old binaries compiled with libc4,
where the path.h file incorrectly had _PATH_MAIL set to /usr/spool/mail (which was probably the default under some very old version of BSD).
This link should be gone from all modern distributions.
the idea of the /usr filesystem is that it can be mounted read only on a system where security is paramount,
and having /usr/spool around prevents this from being true.
Hope that helps.
Regards
Aaron