Re: BUG: Major problem, data loss

[John Merryweather Cooper <jmcoopr webmail bmi net>]

On 2001.08.22 11:39 M . Thielker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2001.08.22 22:50 John Merryweather Cooper wrote:
> > I've  noticed that sometimes stuff like this gets stuffed into one
> of
> > /tmp, /var/tmp, /usr/tmp, etc.  Have you checked there?
> > 
> No, there are a lot of messages I have written and received in the
> past in
> /tmp, in files named mutt-work-xxxx-yyy, but this message wasn't
> there.
> This cannot be allowed to happen. I would suggest to save a copy of
> everything in the compose window as soon as "send" is clicked, before
> doing
> anything else. The file can be deleted on successful transmission, or
> else
> will be overwritten next time a message is sent, but that would at
> least
> allow for recovery of the message text in case something goes wrong.
> 
> Melanie
> 

My thoughts are:

1) find where the buffer over-run (if I'm right) is and quash it; other,
very bad things can happen if such a situation is allowed (such as
compromise scenarios);

2) an option (on by default) to auto-save a message during composition
to the Draftbox with a suitable temporary name until/when the message is
either Saved or Sent;

3) an option (on by default) to queue all outgoing mail in the Sentbox
before Sending.  This is slightly different from the present option of
queuing all mail and then sending; in that the mail would be queued at
once and sent without further intervention by the user--somewhat like
sendmail's "super-safe" setting;

jmc

P.S.  For testing purposes (so I can see if I can prod balsa into doing
this), about how many K would you estimate your message to be (figure 2K
per "page").