[TriLUG] Solved: Squirrelmail - message count doesn't auto refresh on folders - firefox

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Matt Pusateri wrote:

>procmail is not installed by default on FreeBSD.  This domain only has
>two users, and I really have never needed the features of procmail. 
>Of course running sendmail doesn't bother me either, so maybe I'm just
>indifferent.
>
>Aaron, thanks for the history lesson.
>
>I don't mind mail going to /var/mail/.  Does anyone have a good
>technical reason to deliver all mail to ~  besides that all mail for
>each user is in one place.  I am looking for more of an answer than
>personal preference.
>
I hope I'm not putting words in Jason's mouth incorrectly, but the 
common reason to prefer delivering all mail to the user's home 
directory, is a convenient "quick check" of how much space that user is 
actually using on the system.  I.e. you can do "du -sh ~user" and see a 
quick, human-readable, summary of the disk space being used by user, 
including the amount of space being used by that user's mail.  That's 
certainly not something to be discounted out-right, as it is kind of 
handy.  If you're willing to manage the quotas on /home, or accept that 
Joe-Random-Spammer could conceivably fill your disks, then it's 
something you can certainly accomplish.  Of course, if you want a "best 
of both worlds" solution, you can simply create a symlink like 
~user/mbox/Inbox -> /var/spool/mail/user for each user with a command 
like this:
ls /var/spool/mail | while read LINE; do ln -s /var/spool/mail/$LINE 
~$LINE/mbox/Inbox; done;

Then when you come back and do du -shD ~user (don't forget the D, which 
instructs du to dereference symlinks) you pick up both the user's home 
directory, and the symlink to his Inbox in that count.  That's the 
beauty of the UNIX environment, your ability to make the system behave 
like you want, is limited only by your patience to read and comprehend.  
And occasionally, thinking outside the box helps too.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner