On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 11:45:20AM -0600, Tim Tyler wrote: > Qpopper experts, > We recently installed qpopper 4.03 back in December. Since then we have > had 4 occurrances where their mailbox in /var/spool/mail became corrupt for > some reason. We have configured qpopper to write the temporary pop file to > a different directory structure (/var/spool/pop). Given that we have 1500 > active users, it seems to be working for the most part. But occassionally > some users with a quite a few megabytes of email will find that when they > have their client configured to leave on server, their temporary pop file > can't get written back to the mailbox file properly. This has only happened > 4 times now, but it is raising a red flag for me. Something is corrupting > the mailbox file because if I 'vi' into the mailbox and resave (w!) the > file, the file becomes approximately 1/10 of its original size. Its as > though the file thinks its much larger than it really is. This is an > obvious corruption, but I don't know why. It also appears to be a small > subset of the temp pop file which remains in the /var/spool/pop directory. > What might cause the mailbox file to become corrupted when the temp pop > file tries to write itself back to the mailbox file? Is there a compile > option that I might consider to minimize corruption? > Note: we do use a quota, but not all incidences exceeded the quota. Also, > we never had this problem with the old qpopper 2.0.
There are two likely possibilities: 1) [Less likely] You are running qpopper in server mode and have users who are also accessing their mailboxes via UW imapd or a local mail agent like Elm or Pine. This will result in mailbox corruption when the mail agent accesses it during a server mode session. 2) [More likely] I'd second the opinion that you have some conflicting locking method; find out what method your mail delivery agent is using to lock the mail spool file. Normally, with most common mailers such as sendmail or procmail as delivery agent, it should be a "dot-lock" file; but whatever the method is, qpopper and your MTA need to be agreed on it. -- Clifton -- Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWJD? "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge) "JWG" - Eddie Aikau
