mail problems debian

[John G. Heim]

There's a lock feature in procmail that is supposed to prevent corrupted 
mailboxes. I've never tried going without it so I'm not sure that is your 
problem. The second colon on the first line of a procmail recipe specifies 
the use of locking. So :0 means do not use a lock file. :0: means use the 
default lock file. :0:lockfile means use a lock file and call it 'lockfile'. 
If you don't use tha lock file, 2 procmail processes may try to write to the 
mailbox at the same time.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Barrett" <lists at barrettpianos.co.uk>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 11:12 AM
Subject: mail problems debian


> Firstly, sorry for putting this on the list but am going round in circles 
> and not
> getting anywhere.
>
> I have a couple of email addresses and what I am trying to do is use
> fetchmail to pick up all the mail from the various addresses and use
> procmail to sort in to various maildir's.
>
> I did get mail collected from the isp with fetchmail but was finding that 
> the
> mailbox seemed to be getting corrupted on a regular basis and mutt
> reported
> /var/mail/keith is not a mailbox.
>
> If I deleted the file /var/mail/keith and created a new empty one, mutt 
> would
> open and report no mail, as expected but as soon as any mail was
> downloaded, mutt would not open that mailbox.
>
> I could still read the file outside of mutt but that was not ideal.
>
> I thought maybe some of the headers from some list may have been a
> problem so thought to use maildir instead.
>
> Now, if I have the line
> mda "procmail -f-"
> in the .fetchmailrc fetchmail gives an error.
>
> From googling, some results suggest I need a .forward file in my home
> directory but this was not conclusive.
>
> Any thoughts on the corrupted mailbox and the way to go would be good.
> Do I need to change the .procmailrc to use maildir?  Is using maildir 
> likely
> to reduce the corruption?
>
> Thanks
>
> Keith
>
>
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