MTAs and FFS (was: Re: a good mail server)

[Claus Assmann <ca+OpenBSD_misc_(_at_)_zardoc_(_dot_)_endmail_(_dot_)_org>]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002, Henning Brauer wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 05:46:38AM +0000, Yuri K wrote:

> > http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq/reliability.html#filesystems

> man!
> a) this is no qmail issue but a filesystem issue. it's just not documented
>    well for other MTAs but affects them all.

Some "other MTAs" have code that can deal with those "filesystem
issue"s (even though the authors don't like to have extra code for
each of these FFS with different semantics).

For example:

REQUIRES_DIR_FSYNC	Turn on support for file systems that require to
		call fsync() for a directory if the meta-data in it has
		been changed.  This should be turned on at least for
		ReiserFS; it is enabled by default for Linux.  An alternative
		to this compile time flag is to mount the queue directory
		without the -async option, or using chattr +S on Linux.

That MTA also has code to deal with softupdates.