[Toolserver-l] Changes to mail forwarding

[Marcin Cieslak]

>> River Tarnell <river.tarnell at wikimedia.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> During the next maintenance window (March 7th), we will make some 
> changes to how mail forwarding works.  This will not affect most users, 
> but you should read this mail anyway, especially if you make use of 
> .forward files.  A summary of the changes you might need to make are at 
> the end of this mail.
>
> At present, all mail to user at toolserver.org is sent to your LDAP alias; 
> if you don't have an address set in LDAP, mail is sent to nightshade and 
> * If you do not have an LDAP email address set, and you do not have a 
>   .forward file, then currently your mail will be delivered locally on 
>   nightshade.  After the maintenance, your mail will be delivered 
>   locally on either hawthorn or clematis.  We do not support this 
>   configuration, and you should set an email address in LDAP so your mail 
>   is forwarded.  However, if you insist on having mail delivered locally,
>   you can continue to do so.

I use toolserver email only for short-lived reports from cron or other jobs
and nothing that I need to store longer or have a record of communications.

I am currently having "MYPRIMARYEMAILADDRESSOUTSIDE,\saper" in my $HOME/.forward 
which gives me a nice capability to use mail(1) or mailx(1) to quickly read
whatever my jobs running on the localhost do. I do not mind 
*not* having this replicated accross the cluster, so a process running
on willow sends mail to willow etc. 

I do not have any LDAP entry related to mail (and it's fine, too).

Will local delivery on the Solaris boxes still possible?

> The explanation of these changes is more complicated than the actual 
> changes.  The result should be that mail processing is much simpler and 
> more obvious to users.

I understand that all hosts will start processing LDAP entries first,
and forwarding the rest to the two hosts you named. However, currently
local mail on clematis/hawthorn isn't replicated (i.e. when I delete
a mailbox on one of them, everything stays there on the other, so
I have to delete on both).