On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 02:14:53PM -0400, Drew Weaver wrote: > Is this normal? This is the first time its happened to me, a user had a > 'constant' poplock, so I deleted the .lock file, and the /var/mail/user > account is now at 0. > > I've done this a bunch of times and this has never happened. > > Any ideas? > > -Drew
I'm afraid that this is normal; your actions were understandable but not correct. Qpopper apparently creates and locks the .user.lock file, then locks the mail file ["user"], copies all existing mail into the .mail.lock file, and unlocks the "user" file. That way, while the POP user is playing around with his or her mailbox, new mail can arrive in the "user" mailbox file. When this happens, I first make sure that there is not still a 'popper' process running with that person's UID. Often, MSW will leave a port open to the POP server! If so, the user has to shut things down [including sometimes logging out or re-booting] until the 'popper' process goes away. Then, the user should be able to go back in and get his or her e-mail. In the case that there is no 'popper' process running, and the .user.lock file still exists, then you should prepend the contents of the .user.lock file to the "user" mailbox file. One way to do this is to 'cat .user.lock user > /tmp/some-other-file' and then copy the new file back over the "user" mailbox file. Be sure not to over-write any incoming mail! Hope this helps. Also hope you had some backups. ;-) -- Joe Yao [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Joseph S. D. Yao OSIS Center Systems Support EMT-B ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.
