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

[John Summerfield]

Tim Alberts wrote:
> 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).
> 
This last is by far the easiest in your position; it's what I do.

You could muck around getting the nfs mounting automatically with 
autofs, but installing sendmail+dovecot+usual-email-client just works.



-- 

Cheers
John

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