Re: [9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

Re: [9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

[Russ Cox]

Imap is really slow, and I'm not sure why.
I think it's supposed to stay dialed in and
doesn't.  Pop works great.  I'm using it now.

It's true that when you start it, it has to read
all the mail in your mailbox.  Incentive to keep
your mailbox small.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

[anothy]

/// Incentive to keep your mailbox small.

er, yeah, but that's often not an option. i've seen clueless
users mail two copies of Netscape to 100 people on a workgroup
server. upas/fs would grand to a halt in such a condition, and
the memory hit on the server would be tremendous. i use
upas/fs every day, as my only source of mail, but it seems
like the current implementation - particularly the imap
server - isn't designed to scale up particularly well. the
huge delays on startup are particularly a problem for imap;
i've seen clients either time out or retry before upas is
done reading the mailbox. and if they retry (or have the
"check my mail every N minutes" set to a very small N), these
can stack up. i've not kept very careful track, but i
believe every crash of my CPU server i've seen this year
has been (or likely so, anyway) due to Upas' poor
behaviour under stress.
ア

Re: [9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

[matt]

Upas will mount remote mail boxes in your fs

It uses factotum to store your passwords.

It works for pop3 and imap (and maybe others, the man pages tell you more).

The mail is then mounted like local mail (as you would expect)

The downsides :
When I tried it I could only get one password per service per domain stored
in factotum which made mounting multiple mailboxes on the same domain
difficult. (This may have been a shortcoming in my approach rather than
factotum, I'm no expert on it).

It's slow. Not inherently the fault of the upas approach I don't think but
when I mounted my imap account accross the 100BaseT LAN I had to wait for an
age for all the mail to get mounted so I could check for new messages. Imap
isn't speedy at the best of times but the upas solution made it impossible
to use.

I have a script that mounts remote boxes and downloads then injects it into
the local mail system (modelled on Eric Raymond's fetchmail approach) .
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/mailcollector.rc

but be warned. It's not perfect. and I've not exercised it much since it was
written.

(my installation is borked. my font files got corrupted and I cant read the
text when I log in. I'm waiting for a symbios scsi card so i cant get a
proper 3 pc system up)

matt



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Re: [9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

[Russ Cox]

You can check outside POP and IMAP accounts
via upas/fs.  If you update your system and man upasfs
it's described there.  Otherwise, look at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9, then
click on Mail Configuration.

Also check out http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/upasfs

Russ

[9fans] Can I use mail to check outside accounts ?

[Adrian]

Is this possible to use it for all my mail accounts?
After reading the FAQ , it appears to be avaiable only
as a local mail client.