I don't know of a paper, but in the documentation for pine (at least the
distribution from cac at uw) there is some detailed explaination about
problems of using NFS mounted mail boxes because of problems of locking.
The discussion of locking is found in: the pine distribution
"pine home"/imap/docs/locking.txt

Hope this helps.
johnh...

On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Ken Hornstein wrote:

> >I haven't reviewed the paper, but NFS locking, a la lockd, has been
> >mathematically proven to be flawed. If locking's a super concern, you
> >don't want NFS. :-)
> 
> Do you have a reference to this paper?  Everytime someone says this I
> try finding this paper, but it doesn't seem to exist.  I almost think
> it's an urban legend.
> 
> --Ken
>