So after having my laptop go nuts over the weekend I decided to set it up with a readonly root. It's something I'd planned to do to help shake out issues, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet. After getting things set up and starting to use the box it occurred to me that we're probably going to need to keep some state for sendmail. First imagine the disconnected laptop case -- the user may be creating messages and queuing them for later delivery. This implies that the outgoing sendmail directory needs to persist. Imagine everyone's surprise if the outgoing queue were wiped at reboot time. Opps. We also need to persist the spool & incoming sendmail directories as well. Ponder the case where mail is delivered to the client (as I do with mine). Mail may be sitting in /var/spool/mail but not picked up by the UA for a period of time (possibly across a reboot). Failure to persist the mail spool would be bad. Similarly, the incoming queue directory needs to persist as well; final delivery into the spool directory may be delayed for one reason or another due to the configuration of the user's .procmail. [ One could argue that mail shouldn't be delivered to a stateless laptop. However, the ability to read mail and reply while on the road was always something I valued. Perhaps there's better solutions these days for that problem? ] Presumably we have similar issues to address with our other MTA (I forget what it is, I just know we have another MTA available...) Thoughts? Jeff