Email delivery (sendmail->procmail->$HOME/mbox) with fallback

[Tim Alberts]

I want to configure email to deliver to ${HOME}/.mbox and I think I 
understand that now.  Configure /etc/procmailrc with:

MAILDIR=${HOME}/.mbox

Ultimately however, /home will be an NFS mount.  I am wondering what 
happens if that mount is not there when mail needs to be delivered.  I 
am reading that procmail will 'just create it' which seems bad.

I would like to configure procmail so that if the NFS mount is not 
there, to just deliver to /var/mail/ (or /var/spool/mail) so that when I 
get the NFS mount back, I believe I can use formail/procmail to later 
get it from /var/mail to ${HOME}/.mbox.  (If anyone has an example 
configuration that does this, I'd love to see it)

or

To better understand my sendmail configuration, does the following line 
mean:

FEATURE(local_procmail, `', `procmail -t -Y -a $h -d $u')dnl

that if email can't be delivered (because the directory doesn't exist), 
it will just go back into the mqueue for sendmail to try and deliver 
later?  Is this a valid solution, or will sendmail just get overloaded 
with mail that can't be delivered? 'man procmail' shows this via the -t 
option if I read correctly.


In the end, clients can get their email with dovecot via pop3 or imap 
(or Usermin).