Re: mailbox integrity

[Willem Riede <wriede riede org>]

On 2003.08.21 05:01, Pawel Salek wrote:
> 
> On 2003.08.21 04:27, Willem Riede wrote:
> > Is it possible that I have locking issues where Balsa and procmail
> > accessed a mailbox at the same time and I ended up with lost data?
> 
> It is possible if the delivery process does not lock properly the  
> mailbox. Balsa uses usually double locking: first it creates a lock  
> file, then it locks also the file with flock() - the latter one works  
> only on local file systems.  I use recipies like below:
> 
> :0H:
> * ^List-Id:.*desktop-devel
> lists/gnome-devel

I have "MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail" and then deliver to for instance "Balsa"
in which case procmail appends to the file "$HOME/Mail/Balsa".
Will procmail and balsa use the same lock file in this setup?
 
> The other possibility is that the message arrived with damaged MIME  
> structure. In that case, the mailbox file will be large but balsa will  
> read only part of the message. Can you check this lead?

The message is truncated in the mailbox file itself, so the data got
lost when procmail appended it.

By the way, if anyone knows of other ways that such corruption could
happen, I'd appreciate the hint so I can investigate.

Thanks, Willem Riede.