Subject: Re: Still Mailbox vulnerability on PINE4.x...

From: "haenni andre" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 17:31:35 +0200 (CUT)

No, pine 4.02 still passes the lock on to the new process, much the same
as pine 3.96 except that the messages indicating another process is
accessing inbox are no longer automatically displayed in the old session.

Yet this would be the very nature of locking: the new process would say it
cannot open inbox, because it's still locked by another process...

I can imagine situations where such a lock would be used, but I agree
with you -- most of the time, passing the lock on to the new process
is exactly what we want.

I guess the locking mode should be a configuration switch in pine 4.x,
but, at any rate, permissions on /var/spool/mail should not HAVE to be
set to 1777, as pine 4.02 anyway does NOT keep a lockfile there: pine
seems to try writing it, then removes it immediately. What's that good for?

Regards, Andre

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Arthur Snoke wrote:

> Do I understand you to say that pine 4.0N does not ame an open pine
> readonly if a new one is started?
> 
> That feature in 3.96 is one I have very much appreciated having, as I may
> forget to close pine at work on my workstation and then log on to my
> machine from home via modem.  With unix mailtool my inbox got very
> confused.
> 
> I have not upgraded -- seems to still be some sorting out in the
> distribution.
> 
>

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 12:00:54 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

Please read the Pine technical notes sections on locking... as well as
the release notes on this specific topic.

You are spreading quite a bit of misinformation here.

(Hint: Pine uses more than one kind of lock, for more than one purpose.)

-teg