Under the Qmail FAQ there is question of reliability.  It says not
to use softupdates with qmail.  Why is this a problem?  I thought
that that all filesystem operations were guaranteed to be safe by
the "ordered" nature of soft updates?
Here is the excerpt:
 What types of filesystems are safe for mail? 
 Answer: qmail's queue (except for bounce message contents) is crashproof
 if the filesystem guarantees that single-byte writes are atomic and that
 directory operations are synchronous. These guarantees are provided by the
 BSD FFS and its derivatives, and by typical journaling filesystems. 

 Do not use async (or softupdates) filesystems; if you do, and if your
 system crashes at the wrong moment, you will lose mail. Under Linux,
 make sure that all mail-handling filesystems are mounted sync. The same
 comments apply to sendmail and other mailers. 

 It is safe to put qmail's queue on a noatime filesystem. 


This implies that soft updates can break Qmail, much like Linux async
filesystems might.  My understanding of the soft dependencies changes
are that it is totally transparent and undetectable by an application.
(e.g. the application has no way of knowing the metadata was not written
synchronously to disk)
Am I confused?  Is it safe to use soft updates under NetBSD for a mail
server?

Thanks for any input!

-Andrew
-- 
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Andrew Gillham                            | NetBSD ist Affengeil.
gillham@whirlpool.com                     | Nachts ist es kaelter
I speak for myself, not for my employer.  | als draussen.