Changes to GLADSTONE Mail System Speed Delivery, Increase Storage

Over the summer, GLADSTONE's mail system was reconfigured to improve performance and to increase the amount of mail you can receive and store in your account.

Bottlenecks Alleviated

Storage Enhancements. As a result of the reconfiguration, GLADSTONE users can now store twice as much as they previously could (up to 10,000K) in their accounts. In addition, because mail is no longer stored separately, all account files count toward the same quota. If you don't get a lot of mail and want to store other files (such as web pages or homework), you can use the space for that instead---but note that if you completely fill up your account, you won't be able to receive new mail.

Under the old file storage system, a user named "jersmith" had his mail delivered into the file "/var/spool/mail/jersmith". With more than 15,000 GLADSTONE users each having a file in /var/spool/mail, searching this directory to find a particular mail file took a significant amount of time. Since all mail was delivered to, and retrieved from, this single file system, on very busy days the mail files system was "maxed out" just trying to read and write mail files.

To eliminate this bottleneck, GLADSTONE's mail software was reconfigured to deliver mail to, and retrieve mail from, a file called ".mail" in each account's home directory. Consequently, the user "jersmith" now has mail delivered to"/home11/jersmith/.mail". This distributes the effort of mail delivery and retrieval over about a dozen home directory file systems.

Now, even during the busiest days, you should experience faster mail delivery to other GLADSTONE recipients and faster access to your own mail.

Increased Quotas. In addition, all users with the standard 5000K quota have had their quota doubled to 10,000K.

Some Changes to Watch for

If you're a typical GLADSTONE user who reads mail with PINE or uses a remote mail reader like Eudora, Mulberry, or Microsoft Outlook, you may have noticed little more than faster access to your mail and greater storage capacity.

However, if you have a customized mail configuration or use un-supported mail software (anything other than PINE, POP, or IMAP on GLADSTONE) you may experience problems. To avoid as many of these problems as possible, we took the following steps during the conversion:

1. The environment variable MAIL has been set to $HOME/.mail, which tells most unsupported mail software where to find your mail.
2. If your PINE configuration in .pinerc had set "inbox-path" to the word "inbox" or something containing "/usr/spool/mail/", "/var/spool/mail/","/var/mail/",or "/newmail/", it was automatically edited to use the correct default of "~/.mail", and your original .pinerc was saved in .pinerc.old.
3. If your .procmailrc had set the ORGMAIL or DEFAULT variables to something containing "/var/spool/mail/", "/var/mail/", "/usr/spool/mail/", or "/newmail/", these settings were automatically changed to use "$HOME/.mail" instead, and your original .procmailrc was saved in .procmailrc.old
4. If you already had a file named ".mail" in your home directory, it was automatically renamed to ".mail.old".

Problems?

If you're still experiencing problems, it may be because you're not using the standard shell (/bin/csh) or because you have an unusual customized mail configuration. Examine your configuration to make sure it doesn't attempt to store mail in, or retrieve mail from, /var/spool/mail or /var/mail. Also check to see that it looks for incoming mail in ~/.mail.

If you use PINE, make sure you leave the value of "inbox-path" blank in your PINE configuration. To do this,

1. Start PINE by typing the command "pine".
2. Choose "SETUP" (type S) in the main menu, then type C to do general configuration.
3. Highlight the "inbox-path" field using the arrow keys.
4. If the "inbox-path" field says something other than "No Value Set:", followed by the correct default mail file, type D to set the default value for "inbox-path" and Y to confirm that you want to delete the non-default value.
5. Type E to exit configuration, and confirm that you want to save it by typing Y. You should then be able to reselect your inbox from the folder list (L in the PINE main menu) and find your incoming mail.

Questions?

If you have other questions about these changes to GLADSTONE's mail system, contact our UNIX consultants at consult@gladstone.uoregon.edu or 346-1758.