Some time ago, I posted a question about how to prevent the mail
directory from filling up due to people subscribing to newslists, etc.
Unsubscribing these people is not an option, moving the mail directory to
another drive was not feasable either (disk space is limited
*everywhere*) and replacing sendmail (with procmail or whatever) is
"highly discouraged" by the bigest cheese, so we followed a suggestion
received due to this list (thnx!)
I have already posted a summary, but for those of you who may be in a
similar situation, I post this:
Set up an alias in /etc/aliases such as:
nobody: /dev/null
user_a: /usr/users/user_a/.newmail
user_b: /usr/users/user_b/.newmail
...etc...
Modify /usr/lib/Mail.rc to include the line:
set keep
Modify the users' .cshrc file to include:
setenv MAIL $HOME/.newmail
AND finally,
Create a script that executes at logout that:
a) Checks to make sure .newmail exists (and/or has the proper settings)
b) if not, then:
1) touch $HOME/.newmail
2) chmod 6600 $HOME/.newmail
3) print nasty/error message
We initially had troubles with getting to mail to deliver to this file.
Doing a mail -dv (I think that was it) would say "Mail deliverable" but
when we tried to send the mail, it would say "Cannot create file xxx"
regardless if the file already existed or not. With some
experimentation, we found that the settings had to be 6600 for this to
work at all, and if the file is deleted, it will NOT create a new file.
That is why we appended the above script to the logout file.
Another bug we found is this: If a user types "mail" and there is no
mail, they get the message "No mail for .newmail" Does anybody have a
solution for this aside from creating a file with their name in their
directory? We'd like to avoid this for several (obvious) reasons and to
make a more uniform structure among platforms.
-= Chris =-
[.Sig closed for repair]
(ccurtis@ee.fit.edu) ... (cwcurtis@roo.fit.edu)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:59 CDT