On Wed, 2001-09-19 at 09:23, Philip Hazel wrote:
> Let me see if I've understood this right. You don't have any real user
> accounts, but you want to implement facilities whereby the users may
> attempt to do things that could interfere with each others' files.
>
> And you want to implement special, ad hoc facilities to manage this?
> If you want to let users do things other than retrieve their mail by
> POP or IMAP, why not use the facilities that the operating system
> already has built into it - that is, user accounts? These are well
> understood and well debugged. You don't have to allow the users login
> access.
>
> Have I missed some important point here?
Big mail systems may typically have several million "users". However
many unix boxes are still crippled with 16 bit UIDs (is this also an NFS
issue?), plus you then have 2 items of info to keep track of (username
and uid).
Thats why the big mail stuff tends to run as a single uid.
Now I wondered about using filters on such a system - except I was going
to build the filters from a restricted front end... even so having the
facility to restrict filter actions to the users "home" directory would
have its uses.
Nigel.
