sendmail configuration question (sharing mailboxes).

[Guy Middleton]

In article <cZ0Smk200YU5A4CUUX at andrew.cmu.edu> mikem+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Meyer) writes:
> I have a local collection of machines (decstation 3100's running Ultrix
> 3.1, each with a local disk) and I would like to implement a "common"
> mailbox on all of these machines.  The idea is to allow a user to log
> into any machine and be able to see their mail.
> At the moment I do not want to use the YP services.  
> 
> ...
> 
> Does anyone else do anything like this?  Does anyone have any
> suggestions on what I need to do to the sendmail.cf files to implement
> this.

We do this, sort of.  Our setup is on Suns, but that doesn't really matter.

There is an MX record for each client, so mail is sent to the server instead.
Only the server runs a sendmail daemon.

For local delivery, the client sendmail does delivery, without going through
the server.  I know you don't like this, but it really isn't a problem; if you
have people reading their mail on a client, you need to do file locking
anyway.  Two sendmails at once is the same as a sendmail and a user reading
his mail and writing the mailbox back.

The advantage of doing it this way is that server and clients can share a
common config file.

I could send you a copy of our sendmail.cf if you like.  We use an IDA
sendmail, so things may look a bit strange.