> > > Yes. Do any Postfix administrators with busy systems rely on NFS? > > That seems like a really bad idea, honestly. > > So NFS is a poor, outdated choice for mail storage in 2020 for a small/medium > enterprise?
The problem is one of data consistency and locking. Running a farm of IMAP servers off of a common NFS store is acceptable if you make sure Attribute caching is off and you *carefully* review your software manual for gotchas on NFS. For example DoveCot has settings that make it safer for using on NFS. When running a 'shared' sort of setup 'MailDir' style delivery (each message is a unique file) as opposed to 'mbox' style is required. > True, mail delivery won't be postfix responsibility on larger platforms but > the this > mailing list is full of relevant experience. What is the size of your org? It's customary to have a front-end Postfix host that ingests mail, and then sends it to the final delivery host which would also be your IMAP server. On any large number of users some kind of hash is used to distribute email storage across multiple nodes. You could run NFS as the backing store on a single-node (or consistent hash) setup bearing the above in mind. Or you could use local storage and NBD to replicate to another machine for Active/Passive failover. In this day and age running your own email service is pretty unusual. There are lots of hosted alternatives, just provide credit card.
