[plug] Exim mailbox relocation.

[John Usher (Maptek)]

G'day...

Most mail spoolers are pretty strict about the files they write to as a
basic security measure. If a file is a symbolic link, then mail can be
written to places it is not meant to be written, for instance
(a)somewhere else someone can read mail, or (b) a file in a system
directory such as /etc and overwriting a critical file. They are also
extremely fussy about file permissions and groups and the like.

Your best bet in this situation is to export the directory on the 80gig
drive, and mount it on the mail machine as /var/spool/mail or
whatever...

All the usual cautions about cross-mounting mail spools (and other
important directories) applies.

...John...



-----Original Message-----
From: Shayne [mailto:shayne at guild.murdoch.edu.au] 
Sent: Friday, 29 November 2002 6:20 AM
To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
Subject: [plug] Exim mailbox relocation.


I've been wanting to relocate some mailboxes (via symlinks) to 
our new 80gig monster of the 4gig little guy.

Most things on the deb boxen relocate beautifully, even across NFS.
But exim spits hard on it claiming "not a mailbox" (obviously looking
at the symlink and not the linked to file).

Anyone got any idea. One dude on the server has over 7000 emails
in his inbox!

Also, how does one go about hooking into exim to get it to feed mails
to a particular email box straight into a bit of code. I know it can be
done, but I'm rolling a custom list handler (for a web-portal software
for unions that I'm working on) and need to know how to get it
without ugly hacks like manually parsing the /var/mail directory.