Sam,

> > This is my experience, yes. Another advantage is peace of mind
> > that you'll never again fall prey to a corrupted mailbox due to
> > a delivery occurring at the wrong time.
> 
> But shouldn't well-behaved MTAs and MUAs perform locking that
> prevents this from happening?

Yes, they should perform locking.
No, it won't prevent it.

1) System crashes in the middle of delivering mail.

2) Filesystem a few bytes from full.  Open mbox, read messages.  Sync
mailbox; it starts rewriting a bunch of Status: headers, which ends up
extending the file.  *boom*  filesystem full, you've
lost/overwritten/corrupted stuff.


I'm sure with a bit of effort, we could find a number of other failure
modes.



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)     |    [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unix Systems Administrator      |    [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Specializing in FreeBSD         |    http://www.over-yonder.net/

"The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I
      haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"

Reply via email to