Btw, the volume on debian-user is to high for me to read on a regular basis so you should cc me if you want to get a quick(er) answer.
On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Joe Emenaker wrote: > Argh! Okay. Does anybody want to suggest any other imap daemons that allow > me to set the mailroot to $HOME/mail where it's supposed to be? > You can always recompile the package to do it the way you want to. That is one of the benefits of open source after all. It's a one line change and I provide instructions. > Problem now is that, when you refresh your folder list, you see all of your > files in your home directory. Many of these differ substantially from the > normal "inbox" format. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new slew of > complaints from sysadmins because all of their users are having trouble > opening their "core" folder. :) > Which client are you using? Everyone I use (MS outlook, Netscape, Pine) let's you set this on the client-side. All my folders are in $HOME/mail. I don't see any extraneous junk. A "sysadmin" as opposed to "some random shmoe with the root password" should diligently read documentation. I haven't made a secret of what I've done so it shouldn't come as a surprise. > In all seriousness, though... I think that one of the mantras of > user-friendliness these days is that the user shouldn't be allowed to easily > select something wrong. If imapd uses $HOME for its mail directories, > there's really nothing to prevent the user from being presented with a list > of various files when they ask for a list of their mail folders. > It is the admins responsibility to see that the users have a proper setup. > Up to this point, one of the attractive features of Debian is that it > *fixes* the brain-dead defaults put in by the people who originally wrote > the software. > But in this case, whether or not the default is brain-dead is not easy to determine. To us having the mail root be $HOME/mail seems eminently sensible. But believe me many people disagrreed. > Well, you could fix that by having some sort of big warning in the postinst > script or something that required the user to hit a return so that you could > be sure they see it. > That would be even more obnoxious. People hate useless warnings. Perhaps now we have debconf this could be done in a less intrusive way but even then I would not be sure that people saw it. Besides I already have a big warning in the most natural place for someone to look for it. README.debian. > Actually, what we *really* need is some sort of consensus. I mean, it would > be pretty nice if imapd and other tools (like procmail) all looked in the > same default location without any configuration. I know Elm and Pine used > $HOME/Mail and $HOME/mail at one time. > I can't speak for all Debian developers but I have you the users interests in mind when I work on my packages. If there was a consensus I would adopt it no matter what my personal feelings are. But in this case there simply isn't one. > Surely, I can't be the only one who sees the benefit in having all of the > tools look in the same location for the "Sent Mail" folder, and "Drafts", > etc..... > You should make a proposal on the debian-policy list. > Aside from the fact that compartmentalization is a good thing. I mean, > heck... while we're at it, why even bother using /var/spool/mail? Just dump > all mail into /var/spool! :) > It's not symmetric. If the root is $HOME you can store your all you folders in a subdirectory like mail if you like. If it is $HOME/mail someone who wants them in $HOME is out of luck. > But I don't expect this to change anyone's mind, I guess. What I'm really > after is a suggestion for a replacement imapd since I'm obviously going to > have to purge Jaldhar's. I tried the Cyrus-Imap, but wasn't able to get that > to work right out of the box. > You hardly have to take such drastic measures but if the advice above is unsuitable you can also try courier-imapd. Haven't used it so I couldn't tell you its' features though. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>