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Subsections

7 Conclusion

  We have described the benefits of delivering mail to users' home directories, the traditional ways to do that and why we think they are inadequate, and the design, implementation, performance, and convenience of our alternative.

The main contribution of our work is the idea mail can be reliably delivered to user's home directories for easy access with very little overhead, user hassle, or the need for extensive intervention on the part of SAs.

A working prototype version of hlfsd was written in one weekend. However, the ideas represented in the work span several years of experience in network programming (especially RPC), NFS, amd, and mail systems.

7.1 Future Work

 

It would be possible to integrate some of hlfsd's functionality into amd, by providing special keywords like ${home}, ${user} and ${group} for use in amd's maps.

We plan on making sure hlfsd is as portable as amd is, and improving its performance as much as possible. An RPC interface for querying hlfsd's status is needed as well.

7.2 Alternative Uses

  Hlfsd's primary use is that of a mail-spool redirector. However, it can be used to perform other tasks. All it takes are the right command-line options:


next up previous
Next: 8 Acknowledgments Up: HLFSD: Delivering Email to Previous: 6 Related Work
Erez Zadok
12/6/1997