SUMMARY: Mail Locking

Thanks to Pablo Jejcic, Brett Geer and Jason Price for their replies.  
Initial suggestions were to make sure there were no .username or 
username.lock files hanging around (that would survive a reboot) which 
would keep the mailbox locked.  The problem definately wasn't locking, 
so the mailbox was invalid in some way.  There is probably a more 
elegant way to validate a mailbox, but I used webmin and transfered all 
the mails into an empty mailbox, and then discovered the offending mail 
(not read by webmin either).  Ironically, it was spam :)

Darren wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a redhat 9 system running sendmail, fetchmail, ipop3d and 
> spamassassin serving about 25 light load users (500 mails a day max).  
> I have seen problems with mailbox locking before as a result of a 
> dropped connection and they usually sort themselves or I can kill the 
> process, but I have the following in /var/log/maillog
>
> Jul  4 12:25:28 wws-fs ipop3d[21506]: pop3 service init from 
> xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
> Jul  4 12:25:28 wws-fs ipop3d[21506]: Can't open INBOX (file 
> /var/spool/mail/pi-jane): not in valid mailbox format
> Jul  4 12:25:29 wws-fs ipop3d[21506]: Error opening or locking INBOX 
> user=pi-jane host=[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
> Jul  4 12:25:29 wws-fs ipop3d[21506]: Login user=pi-jane 
> host=[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] no mailbox
> Jul  4 12:25:29 wws-fs ipop3d[21506]: Logout user=pi-jane 
> host=[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
>
> The client is told 'error opening users INBOX'.  The two scenarios,
>
> - mailbox format is not valid
> Usermin also runs on this machine to allow checking via the web.  
> Usermin is still working fine, so perhaps it has mangled the file in 
> some way it can still read it.  What are my options for verifying this?
>
> - something has a lock on the file
> I can see no evidence of a lock using 'ps' or 'lsof'.  The machine has 
> also been restarted and the problem still persists.
>
> I've been googling for a while now and can't find a solution ...
>
> Thanks,
> Darren
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