Re: [Evolution] Evo splitting messages in odd ways

i have to concur with joseph. i use standard local delivery (using
fetchmail and procmail) with evolution and at random times i will have
what seems to be a blank email - until i scroll down to the bottom of
the inbox to find a headerless email with a complete body. has happened
for a long, long time. can't find any pattern in it.

On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 11:13, Norman P. B. Joseph wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 10:42, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 09:47 -0400, Norman P. B. Joseph wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > Mail here is delivered locally to a mailhub machine whose
> > > /var/spool/mail directory is NFS mounted to clients like mine.  I have
> > > my evo mail account set up with a server type set as "Local Delivery",
> > > meaning evo periodically checks the NFS mounted spool directory and
> > > moves any messages found there to my inbox under ~/evolution/local.  I
> > > mention this since it seems the likely place for where the process might
> > > be broken.
> > 
> > Isn't it like a *huge* no-no to share (MUA & MTA) an mbox file
> > across an NFS link????
> 
> It's been my observation that what evolution does for a "Local Delivery"
> account is to periodically copy the contents of the file
> "/var/spool/mail/user" to" ~user/evolution/local/Inbox/<some temp file>"
> and then process the messages from the temp file, appending messages to
> ~/evolution/local/Inbox/mbox and other folders as the messages trigger
> filtering rules.
> 
> The greater the frequency of checking /usr/spool/mail/user for new
> messages, the smaller the amount of data that needs to be copied
> atomically, and the smaller the window for locking issues.  In practice
> here for years, both well before evolution (insert fond remembrances of
> Elm and Z-mail under IRIX), and well after, NFS mail spool locking has
> never been an issue.
> 
> Even so, its hard to imagine how a locking problem would manifest itself
> in the behavior I described earlier.  If the local delivery agent on the
> /var/spool/mail host doesn't see a lock set by my host and begins
> appending a message to the mailbox while evo on my host is copying the
> mailbox to its temp file under ~/evolution/local/Inbox, I would expect
> to see the beginning of a partial message at the end of the mailbox, but
> how then to explain the last half of the message?
> 
> My host would never see the tail end of the last message since it
> started copying the file before the tail end was written.  The
> /var/spool/mail host would write the tail end of the last message to the
> file it had open, but that file would disappear after my host deletes it
> (or zeros it out) after the copy.  The next message would be delivered
> to an emtpy file, and the tail end of the message which my host missed
> would end up in the bit bucket.
> 
> My intuition tells me that the problem is not in the copying of the
> mailbox from /var/spool/mail to ~/evolution/local/Inbox, but in the
> process that picks apart the copy of the mailbox under
> ~/evolution/local/Inbox.  But I have no hard data to prove it.
> 
> -norm
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