[plug] Mailbox mystery

[Bernard Blackham]

> 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.

This might make sense. I've seen a similar setup used on an ISP's shell
machine where /var/spool/mail was just mounted off the mail server. I
never experienced these issues there, then again I hardly used Pine at all
on that system.

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

IMAP might just sound appealing so I can incorporate a webmail
self-service in there somewhere. Shall explore what's around, thanks Matt. 

I just experienced another strange issue the other day with mail. The root
partition filled up to 100% and although mail was still collected in the
separate mail partition, it refused to be deleted via POP. So my sister's
machine who's OE5 (*shudder*) collects mail every minute had about 700
copies of each message of by this morning! Thought this might be of
interest if anybody ever experiences the same phenomenon :)

Regards,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au