CMU's graffiti

[Jeffrey T Eaton]

> Is there some more info on this "graffiti"? What's the intention? How is 
> it used? How is it managed? Any quota on it?

"graffiti" is an imap hierarchy on CMU's Cyrus installation.  The
intention is to provide a place for people to create arbitrary shared
mailboxes, for whatever use.  It is essentially unmanaged;  all of the
mailboxes in the hierarchy are pruned from time to time, but apart
from that, we essentially ignore it.  There is no quota, but messages
expire after some time period (90 days, if I recall correctly).

Historically, users have used it somewhat like the USENET alt
hierarchy.  People would create mailboxes for nearly anything, from
flame wars, to unofficial student organization discussions, to
public journals (in the pre-blog world).  Usage has declined over time
in favor of other venues - blogs and such.

In our previous (pre-IMAP) mailsystem (AMS), simply sending mail to
the posting address automatically created the relevant mailbox.  That
ability was not carried over to the new system, instead we set the ACL
on the top level to allow any user to create a subfolder.

-jeaton

-- 
Jeffrey T. Eaton                    esp                      jeaton at cmu.edu
Research Systems Programmer                      Carnegie-Mellon University