I'm running mutt on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) with my incoming mail arriving on an NFS mounted directory.
I.e. /home/chris/Mail is a symbolic link to /snake1/home/chris/Mail which is a directory on another system (snake1) which is where the mail is actually delivered. Mail is delivered to multiple sub-directries under ~/Mail by a python script which filters on (mostly) mailing list name. I'm seeing the "Stale NFS file handle" messages on the mutt status line, I'm not *absolutely* sure when they are occurring but it looks as if it's when a mail is delivered into a mailbox when I'm viewing an E-Mail in that mailbox with mutt. E.g. I was working down my inbox (where non-list mail arrives) this morning and, after reading a message, when I returned to the inbox (quite likely after marking the mail as deleted) I saw the stale NFS error. I *think* the message I had just viewed had failed to get marked as D or O, it remained at N and there was one new message in the inbox. No mail seems to get lost and mutt carries on with no other issues apart from the incorrect message status. So it looks as if I have some sort of locking issue between the delivery process on the server and mutt reading E-Mails (and updating the mailbox). This is mbox format of course. Don't tell me to go back to maildir, having just moved to mbox from maildir it works *so* much better in every way apart from this minor hiccough that I'd stay with mbox and put up with it if that was the only way forward. I'm hoping/guessing that there is maybe something I can do with the python script that delivers the E-Mails that will make it play better with mutt. Does anyone have any ideas on this front and/or pointers to places which will tell me more about how to make file locking etc. work properly on an NFS file system. -- Chris Green
