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

[Tim Alberts]

John Summerfield wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
Sorry I'm not following.  What's the easiest?

I'm moving to the NFS so I can have a central place for file and email 
storage on a system with quality hardware RAID1 and ideally fast SAS 
drives.  Then the email server will run on a fast efficient system with 
cheaper drive and can be easily moved from system to system when 
hardware fails.  This way, I don't end up with mbox's on several 
computers to keep track of.