An introduction to UNIX mail service

by on November 13, 2005 · 0 comments· Last updated November 13, 2005

Most tutorials on UNIX mail services skip section related to mail directories. However joe's (you can get his book Unix for the Beginning Mage here) tutorial starts with /var/spool/mail directory and it further explains the difference between mbox (an electronic mail file format) and maildir format. It explains fundamentals in joe's own classic style :)

"It was Acre's first day of training in the Towers mail department over at /var/spool/mail. This is where all the mail is stored and waits to be retrieved by the POP and IMAP daemons.
"How do these mailboxes work?" Acre asked the admin on duty.
"Well," the admin replied, "it's really not that complicated. Our Tower users a mail storage format known as maildir."
"maildir?"

Read it online.



You should follow me on twitter here or grab rss feed to keep track of new changes.

Featured Articles:

{ 0 comments… add one now }

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes for your code and commands: <strong> <em> <ol> <li> <u> <ul> <blockquote> <pre> <a href="" title="">
What is 5 + 13 ?
Please leave these two fields as-is:
Solve the simple math so we know that you are a human and not a bot.



Previous post:

Next post: