On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 08:11:03PM +0000, Neil J. McRae wrote:
/export/mailboxes/j/o/h/n/johndoe.mbox
In the past I've actually found that reversing the letters gives much better randomosity around the directory structure so, johndoe@clown.org would end up in e/o/d/n/johndoe and you don't take much of a hit for this.
i'm currently implementing a largish mail server, and have come up with what i think is a nice way to deal with scale and redundancy, etc, etc. what i have done is create a couple DNS zones, which are like: $ORIGIN mailbox.domain.com bob IN CNAME popserver1 john IN CNAME popserver1 bill IN CNAME popserver2 $ORIGIN smtp.domain.com bob IN A 10.1.1.1 ; ipaddr of mailserver1 john IN A 10.1.1.1 ; ipaddr of mailserver1 bill IN A 10.1.1.2 ; ipaddr of mailserver2 then, users are told to set their SMTP to username.smtp.domain.com and to direct their POP/IMAP client at username.mailbox.domain.com. you might even be able to get away with a single map. incoming mail should direct username@domain.com to username@username.domain.com in any case, using this method, you can now arbitrarily store mailboxes on any of several machines, even possibly in several locations. if a server fails, you can quickly redirect the users to another server so that new mail piles up in their new mailbox, and you can restore the broken server on a more leisurely pace. this can be extended to allow users to check their email with a web-based packet at http://username.mailbox.domain.com, or even be shortened so that they can have personal website http://username.domain.com how to implement the actual DNS is left as an exercise of the student. -- [ Jim Mercer jim@pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.ca ] [ Reptilian Research -- Longer Life through Colder Blood ] [ aka jim@reptiles.org +1 416 410-5633 ]