Re: mailbox integrity

[Willem Riede <wriede riede org>]

On 2003.08.21 05:05, Carlos Morgado wrote:
> 
> On 2003.08.21 03:27:22 +0100 Willem Riede wrote:
> > I recently experienced mail damage. Fetchmail's log shows a 2MB message
> > coming in, when I look at the mail in Balsa, only a 57K truncated attachment
> > (too damaged to open) shows.
> > 
> > I have fetchmail getting mail from my ISP, goes to sendmail, then procmail,
> > which puts mail in a mailbox file depending on where the mail originated.
> > 
> > Is it possible that I have locking issues where Balsa and procmail accessed
> > a mailbox at the same time and I ended up with lost data?
> > 
> 
> Unlikely, in the sense "nobody reported that before".
> Did you check the actual contents of the mailbox ?

Yes, the mailbox contents is truncated.

> Was balsa writing to the same mailbox at the same time ?

I cannot categorically say so, but the mail was received while I was reading
and disposing of mail, moving from folder to folder. It is definitely possible
that balsa was committing changes to the mailbox at the same time as procmail
needed to store the new mail message.

> I take it you checked you have free disk space :) Namely, do you have
> /tmp space ? Balsa uses tmp to handle attachments so a near-full tmp
> would result in aparently truncated attachments.

Sure did. I have lots of free space, 727 MB on /tmp and 21 GB on /home.

By the way, my problem may well be something else, but I have no idea
what else to suspect...

Thanks, Willem Riede.