A-Ha! Found it! There are clues scattered about the netnews posting
I attach to this email.
There's a pile o' problems here. They can all be summed up by "mbx".
This is a special non-standard mailbox folder format, invented by
someone who thinks Maildir is a bad idea. That much can be said
objctively, and so I think I'll just stop there.
tmail appears to be the gizmo created to allow sendmail to deliver
directly into "mbx" format folders.
If you want to use mutt, you need to get your email out of those
folders. If you want to use mutt and _enjoy_ it, you'll need to do
this on a permanent basis, so a one-time conversion isn't any real
help.
If you hate the works of that designer as much as I do, you can free
yourself from them entirely by e.g. using procmail for your local
delivery. Set up your .forward to pipe into procmail, and set your
.procmailrc to file your email in some normal folder format.
If that kind of brute-force assault against the establishment makes
you nervous, then why not dodge the problem; if your server is using
tmail, it's probably also running an imap server that works off mbx
folder format, so use mutt's imap support. Set your inbox to
{localhost} and read your email that way.
-Bennett
On 3 Mar 2000, Matthew Black wrote:
> I'm interested in migrating my site from the Unix and mbox drivers to
> the mbx driver but don't know how.
There are three parts of the equation, which must be considered
independently. You can also choose not to do any one of these, although
generally you'll do at least (1).
1) Creating an mbx-format INBOX for each user. This is done by using the
mbxcreat program in ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap-utils.tar.Z,
e.g.
mbxcreat #driver.mbx/INBOX
while logged in as the user.
2) Converting existing mailboxes to mbx format. This is done by using the
the mbxcvt program in ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap-utils.tar.Z
e.g.
mv myfolder myfolder.old;mbxcvt myfolder.old mbx myfolder
3) Causing new secondary folders to be created in mbx format. This is
done by rebuilding c-client based applications (imapd, Pine, etc.)
with CREATEPROTO=mbxproto (instead of unixproto) in the c-client
makefile (imap-4.[]/src/osdep/unix/Makefile).
4) Delivering new mail directly to the mbx-format INBOX. This is done by
using either tmail (again from the IMAP utilities package) for a direct
call from sendmail, or dmail if you want to do it from procmail.
All of the IMAP utilities have man pages to help you along.
> I read that both mbx and mbox use a flat file format. When a user
> connects to the imap server, the mbox driver copies the mail spool into
> the file ~/mbox if it exists. What does the mbx driver do?
The mbx driver uses a file called INBOX in the home directory as INBOX.
Most sites configure direct delivery to it (see (4) above) but if there is
an INBOX in the spool directory the mbx driver will automatically snarf
the new messages into the mbx INBOX.
> How does one configure their system to select the mbx driver? Will
> this affect the flat-file format of user folders or just the inbox?
> As system administrator, do I need to create an empty INBOX file in every
> user's home directory?
Have I answered these questions to your satisfaction?
> I would prefer this change to be transparent to
> users so they don't need to edit their Netscape configuration.
It should be.
> Does the
> env_init() patch specifying that imap folders reside in ~/mail/ rather
> than ~/ affect where to place mbx INBOX?
Yes.
> The mbox driver always expects
> that file to be located in ~/mbox. If a user manages to destroy their
> mbx INBOX file, does this push them back to the Unix driver?
Yes. The same is true for both mbx and mbox.
-- Mark --
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