[Imap-uw] Simultaneous access to imap mailbox?

[Jeroen van Aart]

Dan Pritts wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 01:33:50PM -0700, Mark Crispin wrote:

> My understanding is that this is what caused the spectacular failure of
> the new mail system at a big 10 university last fall.
> 
> they had bought their fancy NFS servers from a large vendor known for
> their PCs.

You wonder why those IT people don't read the manuals. That using NFS is 
not advised is pretty clearly written in quite a number of places in the 
manuals of various tools. At least I remember it that way, because the 
idea "NFS is bad for this" is imprinted in my brain. ;-)

But even in a conceptual way it looks like a bad idea, as it introduces 
one more thing which can go down. Email is seen as so critical, you want 
to avoid downtime as much as possible. And keep the mail boxes on the 
mail server. To distribute server load you could set things up so email 
gets routed depending on its (domain)name. In that case if the server 
for emails sent to X is down, emails sent to Y still arrive and vice versa.

> (trying to be a bit oblique so as not to anger/embarrass anyone).

I'd say a healthy dose of embarrassment might help prevent such mistakes 
in the future. :-)

Greetings,
Jeroen