[plug] Mailbox mystery

[Matt Kemner]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Bernard Blackham wrote:

> Basically the first 2821 bytes of one and 1975 bytes of another of
> Christian's posts have been chewed into \000's.
 [SNIP]
> Our mail is collected by a Linux server sitting humbly across the desk
> from me, running sendmail 8.9.3/8.8.7 on RH6.0. It's logs do actually show
> the receival of all messages at their respective times. On my linux
> machine, /var/spool/mail is NFS mounted off the server, and Pine on my
> machines fetches its mail from there. Somewhere in there Christian's ;)
 [SNIP]
> somewhere, or does NFS play mind games occasionally (personality issues?)?

I have heard of file locking problems with mail spools mounted over NFS,
but I didn't know it could truncate the files like that.. Could be
possible I guess - if pine was writing to the file while mail was coming
in, the mail could be appended to the end of the file at a file offset
that didn't exist at the time because pine was still writing to it - which
means it gets filled with nulls.

Maybe you could either run imap on your mailserver and have pine connect
to that, or run pine on the mailserver itself?

 - Matt