User mailboxes arent really "part" of exim. They are "part" of unix
itself, and the standard location for them, wether you use sendmail,
exim, qmail, or something else, is /var/spool/mail (at least in linux,
some unix flavors use /var/mail, some use /usr/spool/mail, some have
them all pointing at the same place...),
There is the occasional exception of a large site implementing
in-home-directory mailboxes either to include them in user quota more
easily, or simply becuase they dont want five billion entries in
/var/spool/mail and they've decided its easier to do homedir than
/var/spool/mail/u/s/username (and its usually a pain in the butt
getting EVERYthing that looks at user mailboxes reconfigured/recompiled
to look in the new location, in either case)
Most MUA (pine, elm, mailx), and MUA-agent programs (POP and IMAP
daemons of various flavors) expect user mailboxes to be in that
standard location. True, you can recompile/hack/reconfigure them
(maybe), but why? Why not just use the standard convention?
The MTA's spool directory is for *in-transit* messages, not user
mailboxes. Its sort of "internal" to the MTA, whereas user mailboxes
are "external" of the MTA. You are combining two seperate spools into
one space.. Why shouldnt you do that? For the same reason not to just
put all files in /, its a concept of organization, seperating things by
function. You say you want all "exim" things in the same directory -
I repeat - user mailboxes are NOT part of exim, they are part of your
unix system.
Now, having said my piece, I will point out that you are free to put
your files anywhere you want (even if you want to store all mail in
/tmp or /lib) - I'm just trying to figure out why you are going to such
great trouble to override the standard/default convention.
On Sun, 14 Nov 1999, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
>
> stuart.children@??? said:
> > If you've got a reason why not, please state it - then I explain my
> > reasoning better. I assume however, that you're referring to the
> > possible problems that Otavio alluded to. As I said in my reply to
> > his message, I don't have users with names that could cause problems.
> > I just prefer to have all the exim things together. There's no real
> > reason why I couldn't seperate the exim and mail spools... but why
> > should I if there's no problem with my setup? To be complete safe?
> > Sure, but I'm not that worried on this particular system.
>
> You have two disparate functions in the same directory - I would call
> that dangerous - specifically I think it could be used to craft an
> interesting security attack. As exim is a large setuid program doing
> this like this is unwise.
>
> If you want to put all your mail related things together, then rather
> that having /var/spool/exim as both your delivery mail spool and
> transit mail base directory, put an additional level of heirarchy in
> place - ie make your delivery mail spool be /var/spool/exim/delivery or
> something. Personally I would still make them separate.
>
> Nigel.
> --
> [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
> [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
>
>
>
>
> --
> ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ##
>
