Re: iPhone Mbox Corruption

On 07/29/2010 01:15 PM, Neal Morgan wrote:
> Thanks for the response Chris.
>
> I am using "whatever Debian came with!"  :-)  I believe it is mbox: the
> files are /var/mail/[username]
>
> I am a little surprised to hear multiple connections to the same mailbox
> is unsupported.  I have had plenty of this over the years (most in the
> form of Outlook or Mac Mail on a desktop and blackberry or other phone
> at the same time) and it has been working fine.  The only issue we've
> run into is users employing POP on their desktop at the same time as
> IMAP on their phone.  That causes the same kind of corruption.  We have
> discouraged this and suggested they switch to using IMAP in both places.
>
> This issue with the iPhones appeared here in the last 6 months when we
> upgraded this box - moving away from a custom UW-imap build in favor of
> the package maintainers version.  I suppose I could go back to building
> it myself - it was just a hassle to figure out how to get c-client to
> install correctly.

   Yeah, it's an unsupported configuration.  I was surprised too, years 
ago, when I was told by someone else that they were using another imap 
server for this reason.  Upon investigation, Mark indicated that it was 
the mbox format, not the daemon in general, that had this limitation. 
And it works fine as long as you close one mail client before opening 
another.  It's just the possibility of numerous simultanious updates 
that isn't handled "well".

   So, I switched to mbx.  A little more of a pain to deliver mail, as 
it's not the MTA's native format, but the tmail program that comes with 
the uw-imap tools works around that.  I just deliver to an mbx format 
INBOX in each users home directory.  Or, for myself (ie, "some users"), 
run procmail on incoming mail including spamfiltering, and use dmail to 
deliver it to the right mailbox of mine.

   Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

                                 - Chris
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