Best solution for mail server?

[Henning Larsen]

Hello.

On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 23:26 +1030, Tim wrote:

> In my rc.local files I have lines like the following (below).  And each
> user has their ~/.fetchmailrc file set for whatever servers their
> accounts will poll.
> 
> su tim -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 900"
> su john -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1200"
> su jane -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1500"
> 
> I picked different polling periods so that mail runs will not run at the
> same time as each other (spreading the workload around).  Any user can
> stop their own automatic poll, and restart it, if they want to.
> 
> I only roughly picked different time periods, if I really wanted to
> ensure that they hardly ever ran at the same time, I'd have used prime
> numbers.  But I'm too lazy to bother to work out large prime numbers,
> and I don't think it's that important for me.  It'd be different if you
> had a large number of users, then it might be quite beneficial.

Thank you Tim, and others.

The .fetchmailrc files is now in users home dirs. They are owned by
root, and they contain passwords.
Should I change owners of the files and put passwords somewhere else?

About what you said about primes, I don't follow.
if polls happen every 11 and 13 minute they will crash every 11x13 min.
if polls happen every 10 and 12 minute they will crash every 10x12 min.
as long as the numbers not divide to whole numbers like 6 and 12 does it
will be the same. But primes ensure that situation never happend, am I
right?

Please answer my first question, the second about primes was just a
thought.

I hope my english is understandable.

Henning Larsen