SUMMARY: NFS mount /var/mail vs POP mail

D. Ellen March (emarch@pinole1.com)
Tue, 24 Jun 1997 15:50:31 -0700 (PDT)

Many commented that I should look into IMAP instead of or in
addition to POP. Also, many suggested that auto mounting
/var/mail vs hard mounting /var/mail would work. Also suggested
was using aliases/sendmail to redirect mail from the mail server
to the users' individual machines instead of a shared /var/mail.

I decided to take that last suggestion for the majority of
our users, and let the rest choose between nfs mounting /var/mail
or using POP.

Thanks go to:

miquel@Omega.uab.es
Alex Soares <alex@nc-rj.rnp.br>
Chris Marble <cmarble@orion.ac.hmc.edu>
Dan Pritts <danno@aa.fv.com>
David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
Francis Liu <fxl@pulse.itd.uts.edu.au>
Harvey Wamboldt <harvey@iotek.ns.ca>
jbwendl@mtb.phil.mop.com (James Wendling)
lzins@sequana.com (Larry Zins)
Linda Cygan <lcygan@wpm.com>
gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil (Marc S. Gibian)
"Mark Baldwin" <baldma@hotmail.com>
Michael Kohne <mhkohne@moberg.com>
nsp83273@cae091.ed.ray.com (Neal S. Pressman ex 2317)
Stefan <s.voss@terradata.de>
Stephen Harris <sweh@mpn.com>
moorewr@acasun.eckerd.edu (Walter R. Moore)

Original query:
> We have an all sun network, all running 2.5.1, running NIS+.
>
> We have about 200 users, 100 machines.
>
> Currently, we mount /var/mail from the mail server on all
> 100 machines. Of course, if the mail server needs to be
> rebooted, we have to umount and mount /var/mail all over
> again on all those machines. Also, I suspect this arrangement
> contributes a bunch to network traffic.
>
> We just installed QPopper2.2 on a sparc5, 170 mhz, 32mg of ram.
>
> I would like to recommend that our users get their mail using
> a pop client, rather than mounting /var/mail over NFS.
>
> Could that machine handle that amount of users polling for
> mail approx every 30 seconds each using POP? Actually, at any one
> time we probably only have 50 -75 users logged in.
>
> Does this even sound like a good idea? I would be interested
> in the pros and cons.

Ellen
emarch@pinole1.com