Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Chris Ricker]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote:

> > that's my mbox format email directory. No gobbled RAM, no molten hard 
> > drives, no corrupted mailboxes in ~8 years of reading email out of that 
> > directory, no need for hyperbole.
> 
> OK, you haven't seen corruption.  I'd wager that's because the system is 
> not a large, multi-user system and completes individual deliveries quickly.

And you'd lose that bet. My email is on a box w/ a few thousand active
different users. The only modification from Unix is that the mbox is in the
user's home dir (for quota reasons), not in /var/mail. In fairness, that
spreads the mail activity across a lot of RAID devices, perhaps more than if
I'd left it in /var/mail.

> In any case, your evidence is anecdotal, not proof.  It doesn't mirror 
> my own experience.  I've moved two companies to Maildir style delivery. 
>   Both were previously using Slackware/Linux 2.0/sendmail/procmail. 
> This combination was not only corrupting mailboxes, but corrupting the 
> entire file system that the spools were on. (Damn Linux 2.0... Damn it 
> to hell)

You probably had dueling locking between procmail and sendmail. That's an
app problem, not an inherent mbox problem that can't be avoided.

> in it.  I think that defaulting to Maildir, but doing nothing to remove 
> support for mbox, is clearly the best way to go.

And I really don't think it's that clear. Being non-standard for little or
no gain for most users (and losing the convenience of mbox) is not a win,
IMO.

later,
chris