[Imap-uw] Simultaneous access to imap mailbox?

[Ken Mandelberg]

Jeroen van Aart wrote:
> Ken Mandelberg wrote:
>> This ends up with a variety of unpleasant results, mostly not getting 
>> notified of new mail at the active location, or sometimes deleted 
>> messages reappearing.
>>
>> Is there a way to avoid the conflicts by a change on the server side, 
>> perhaps by using a different message store?
> 
> Yes, convert the inboxes to mbox format. It is fine to have mail be 
> delivered by the MTA in /var/mail/xxx and then have imap "slurp?" it to 
> /home/xxx/INBOX when a user connects. The INBOX file you convert to mbx 
> using mailutil. For example: "su - xxx && mailutil move INBOX 
> "#driver.mbx/INBOX" && exit".
> 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I've read a little about this now.

Our home directories are nfs mounted, and I read that mbx concurrency 
doesn't work over NFS.

Would it work to just symbolically link ~id/INBOX to /var/mail/mbx/id.


Also, is imapd robust in dealing with failures in moving mail from the 
mbox to the mbx due to out of space failures? For example will it only 
delete the mail from mbox after a synchronous write succeeds to the mbx?
If a large piece of mail is moved that partially succeeds does that 
corrupt the mbx?