Postifx delet's my mail???

[MattRK]

Ok, i have a server running mandrake 8 with postfix installed. I use imap instead of pop. Well the other day i decided to check my email, and low and behold, my inbox was empty. My /var/spool/mail/$user file was 0 bytes. Empty. Apparently something deleted it. Or erased it. Does anyone know if postfix is setup by default to do this? (delet the /var/spool/mail/$user file) Or is this just a freak of nature. lol. Thanks for any help you can provide.

-Matt Keller

 

[Norwich]

Hi,

Postfix won't touch this - delivery to the spool files is normally handled by procmail which is very stable. If something had happened to procmail, then new mails wouldn't arrive rather than have those there disappear.

A possibilty is that you ran another mail client on the server (mutt pine etc) which moves mail out to another directory. Have a nose around Mail, mail, mbox etc directories in your /home/USER directory to see if they've been dumped in there.

Is the mail directory is mounted on a sperate partition from /var partition? it could be that the mount is failing and so the directory appears empty.

 

[StarTAC]

u might want to look at Maildir... qmail is an MTA that comes with qmail.. qmail employs Maildir, which means each e-mail is a single file.. which is better than Mbox, as it doesn't create a .pop lock file..

courier-imap supports Maildir, so you would be able to read your e-mail with a web interface as well...

good luck...

 

[MattRK]

Thanks for your help. Your probably right. Postfix it self probably didnt do it. I have decided just to make a dedicated mail server. I might go with freebsd or debian. (both of which i have heard good things about) I'm also going to try to impliment mysql in. Everyone says that is the way to go now days. Thanks again!!

-Matt Keller