Subject: invalid mailbox format??

From: Steve Salazar <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:48:53 -0700 (PDT)

I've got a really big problem with pine refusing to read my
/var/spool/mail/me after my pop retrieval program has touched
it.  pop-perl5 and pine have been working together fine for a long time
and now suddenly I get the 'invalid mailbox format' error every time.

If I delete my /var/spool/mail/me and then have it regenerated by sending
mail locally everything works.  Pine opens and moves my mail to my
mbox.  As soon as my pop program touches it again it quits working
again.  I read the FAQ and checked to see if my /var/spool/mail/me starts
with "From ....", and it does.  I can even open it and read it with any other
mail program fine (mutt, mail) but pine refuses.

I've tried everything I can think of (including briefly exploring mutt as
a mail client option, not a good idea) but nothing will get pine and my
pop retriever to work together again.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Esteban Salazar
[email-masked]

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From: William Maddler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 11:26:24 +0200 (CEST)

Looks like the problem is with POP-Perl5... try asking help on a specific
mailing list... :)

-- 
                                               ---------------------------
                                               William Maddler
                                               ---------------------------
                                               http://www.bid.it
                                               http://william.maddler.net
                                               http://www.yoyomaniacs.com
                                               http://www.pollodigomma.org

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From: James Kirkpatrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 08:05:49 -0600 (MDT)

This often comes up when an uncoordinated updater modifies the mailbox
at the same time some other process is doing the same thing.  By
"uncoordinated" I mean, typically, a mail client that doesn't flock the
file.  Here, the result is that the file has a few trailing header lines
from some previous message.  Pine expects the file to begin with the
beginning of a message, i.e. "From ".  The solution is to edit the file
and delete everything down to the next "From ".

NOTE that's "From " and not "From:"

And, whatever you did to break it, don't do it again :-)  As another
poster suggested, your pop server may be garbage.

Jim