It appears that Mark Delany via mailop <q...@zulu.emu.st> said: >On 22Nov24, Eric Tykwinski via mailop apparently wrote: >> Here’s the thing that confuses me, and perhaps because I don’t know >> Interplanetary File System as much as I should. >> You have /var/spool/mail/user which changes every time you receive/delete a >> message, and that changes the hash/CID which I’m assuming will >replicate to other distributed systems on IPFS. Is there a read/write lock so >you don’t overwrite changes on server a vs server b. > >This has been a challenge of distributed mail stores since day one. Same >problem arose >when people started putting /var/spool mail on NFS servers in the 80s.
You can make the problem a lot easier by putting each message in a different file like Maildir does, but you still need some sort of locking or you'll have race conditions when two agents try to work in the same file. Maildir is sort of cheating there since you get the locks for free on atomic operations like rename() or unlink(). It's not immediately clear to me what kind of mail you'd want to put on a write-once file system. The vast majority of the mail I get is not worth saving. R's, John _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
